01 / Work / Trax Hydraulics Burscough, Lancashire · 2024 — ongoing

Trax Hydraulics.

From a toxic backlink crisis and a stalled developer relationship to a clean rebuild on WordPress — with an ongoing technical SEO programme behind it.

Hydraulics & Industrial
Burscough, Lancashire
WordPress
SEO
Web Management
Total Redesign

Client: Trax Hydraulics (North West) Ltd
Sector: Industrial · hydraulic systems & service
Engagement: Full rebuild + ongoing maintenance & SEO
Launched: December 2024

Live · trax-hydraulics.co.uk Trax Hydraulics homepage hero — Professional Hydraulic Specialists, with the company's branded vehicles and depot in the background

Trax Hydraulics homepage hero — Professional Hydraulic Specialists, with the company's branded vehicles and depot in the background

Homepage hero · December 2024 rebuild

The brief

What started as a redesign request was already much more than that.

Trax Hydraulics are hydraulic specialists based in Burscough, in West Lancashire — supplying, installing, and maintaining hydraulic systems across a diverse range of industries. When they approached me towards the end of 2024, the situation was more complicated than a redesign request. Their site’s backlink profile had been compromised so severely that visitors were occasionally being served Japanese e-commerce spam content — a tell-tale sign of a search-engine cloaking attack. For a professional B2B business, having prospective customers land on spam content is as damaging as it gets.

On top of the technical crisis, Trax had a difficult relationship with their existing developer — unreliable, unresponsive, and charging disproportionately for even the most minor updates. They needed a fresh start on every level.

The challenge

Toxic backlinks had to be fixed before anything else.

The toxic backlink problem had to be addressed before anything else. A new design built on a compromised foundation would inherit all the same problems — so the technical cleanup came first.

Using Google Search Console I identified and submitted a disavow file covering the harmful backlinks, systematically working through the profile to neutralise the damage. The process took approximately six weeks to take effect — backlink cleanup is not instant, and managing client expectations during that period is as important as the technical work itself.

Alongside the cleanup, the brief for the new site was clear: build something that actually reflects who Trax are. The old site had never done that. A business operating across multiple industries with a comprehensive product and service range deserved a site that communicated that breadth confidently — not something that undersold them at every turn.

What visitors were seeing

The cloaking attack, captured.

A Wayback Machine snapshot of trax-hydraulics.co.uk in May 2024 — visitors were being silently redirected to Japanese e-commerce spam pages while the address bar still showed Trax’s legitimate domain. This is the kind of damage a toxic backlink profile does when it goes unmanaged.

Wayback Machine capture of trax-hydraulics.co.uk in May 2024 — instead of the hydraulic engineering business, the domain was serving a Japanese e-commerce product page for a Mandarin Brothers dog driving cushion, with the TRAX-HYDRAULICS.CO.UK branding still visible in the top-left — Before · Wayback Machine, May 2024

Trax Hydraulics homepage after the rebuild — Professional Hydraulic Specialists, with branded vehicles and depot photography, served from the same domain — After · December 2024 rebuild

Same domain, twelve months apart. The cloaking was invisible to anyone who didn’t happen to land on the affected pages at the wrong time — which is exactly what made it so damaging to Trax’s commercial enquiries.

The solution

A clean WordPress rebuild on a clean foundation.

Stop misrepresenting the business. Start indexing the actual work.

The new Trax Hydraulics site launched in December 2024 — a complete redesign built on WordPress, working within the established Trax brand identity.

The structure was built to reflect the genuine scope of what Trax offers — from hydraulics and pneumatics to oils and lubricants, fuelling solutions, power wash equipment, fluid transfer, and beyond. A business with that range of products and services needs site visitors to be able to navigate confidently, not one that buries what they do in a flat, outdated layout.

The result was a site Trax were immediately happy with — specifically that it finally reflected their business accurately. That might sound like a minimum requirement, but for a company that had been carrying a site that actively misrepresented them, it was a significant change.

An ongoing maintenance agreement is now in place, covering regular updates, security monitoring, and technical SEO — including continued monitoring and management of the backlink profile. Toxic backlinks don’t stop appearing after a single cleanup; ongoing vigilance is part of the service.

The result

Crisis resolved. Foundation working. Phase two under way.

Eighteen months on from the December 2024 launch, the picture is clear. The toxic backlink situation that was sending visitors to Japanese spam content is fully resolved, and — more importantly — the backlink profile has stayed clean ever since. The security measures introduced at launch have neutralised every subsequent attempt to reintroduce harmful links. This is the bit most backlink-cleanup engagements get wrong: they treat the cleanup as a one-off job. It isn’t. It’s an ongoing discipline, and the Trax profile has held.

Organic search performance has moved with the foundation. Organic traffic is up 32% since launch, with the underlying impressions and click data both trending healthily in Search Console. Trax have reported that customers regularly comment on the improvement — the site finally represents the business properly, after years of working against it.

The next phase of the engagement is now in motion. A proposal for an 80+ page expansion — building out individual service pages and location-targeted landing pages across the North West — has been approved in principle, with the build commencing this summer. The intention is to take a site that currently ranks credibly for the Trax brand and turn it into one that ranks for the specific service and location combinations a B2B business with Trax’s geographic reach should be visible on. By the time that work is complete, the site will be a comprehensive organic-search asset — not just a representation of the business, but an active commercial channel for it.

A client said

“Rich is genuinely strategic. He doesn’t just fix problems, he focuses on what drives results — he took the time to understand the business and every change we made was with purpose. It isn’t just a prettier redesign. It’s bringing in higher-quality enquiries.”

Tom Wright

Director

Trax Hydraulics

What was delivered

Built, in order.

Toxic backlink audit and cleanup via Google Search Console disavow
Full WordPress website redesign and rebuild — live December 2024
Ongoing website maintenance agreement
Technical SEO — including ongoing backlink profile monitoring
32% organic traffic uplift in the eighteen months since launch
80+ page site expansion — service and location pages across the North West (approved in principle — commencing summer 2026)

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Working together

Is your site working against you?

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