How CBRE Lost 100 Keyword Rankings in 1 Day

Commercial real estate services firm CBRE deleted a page on their website that was ranking for 100 keywords, blowing up a valuable source of traffic that was bringing in nearly a thousand visitors per month.

Some of the high-trafficked keywords they lost rankings for:

• 香港房價 (Hong Kong house prices)
• 世界房價排名 (ranking of house prices in the world)
• 香港平均房价 (Hong Kong average house price)

The page (that now returns a 404) was https://www.cbre.com.hk/press-releases/hong-kong-holds-spot-as-worlds-priciest-residential-property-market

How CBRE Could Have Kept the Traffic

They simply could have kept the page live. I suspect they took it down because their Press Releases section only has pagination going up to page 13 and anything older than that is removed. The date of the press release that was deleted was June 8, 2020 while the oldest press release on their site is from March 13, 2023 so they must be automatically removing older press releases.

Instead of removing a page that had keyword rankings and traffic flowing to it, CBRE could have either:

• Kept the page indefinitely by not deleting old press releases from their site. For example, here's the press release from Apple in 2005 releasing the iPod nano. It's been 20 years and they've kept it up.
• If there was no way around deleting old press releases, CBRE could have recreated the press release fresh at the same URL

Both of these solutions would have prevented the catastrophic loss of rankings. Long term though it's likely the page would still decay in rankings and traffic since fresh content has an edge with Google.

The best solution then would have been if CBRE remade the deleted press release as a static page (not under their Press Releases section) and kept it updated each year since the topic is evergreen. Each successive year, as Hong Kong moves in the rankings of the world's priciest property markets, CBRE could update the page so that Google sees it as fresh and worthy of continually ranking well.

Don't Let This Happen to Your Site

CBRE almost certainly didn't know they were sitting on a page ranking for 100 keywords. That's the real problem — not the deletion itself, but the absence of a process to catch it before it happened.

A routine content audit would have flagged this page immediately: live rankings, steady traffic, evergreen topic. Instead, an automated system quietly wiped it out and nearly a thousand monthly visitors disappeared overnight.

If you're managing a content-heavy site, chances are you have pages like this too — assets you don't know you have, or risks you don't know you're taking.

I'm Doug Pierce, founder of Cogney and have been doing SEO for over 15 years, working with companies like AIG, Airbnb and Coinbase. If you're curious what an audit of your site would turn up, let's talk.