KHTS (Hometown Station)
KHTS is a longtime Santa Clarita radio station and news outlet (AM 1220/FM 98.1) with a 16-year website archive of over 47,500 pages. 95Visual was brought in to diagnose and reverse a multi-year traffic decline tied to negative SEO, and separately identified a severe front-end performance problem affecting the site.
The site's traffic collapse traced back to a period of open guest posting that invited low-quality, off-topic content and toxic backlinks onto the domain. 95Visual audited the full site and backlink profile, flagged 478 pages for removal (concentrated in gambling/casino, CBD, and crypto/NFT content with no connection to local news), and began working through a disavow and cleanup process category by category. A separate performance audit (PageSpeed, Lighthouse, and network waterfall captures) diagnosed a client-side bottleneck: dozens of third-party ad and tracking vendors keeping pages perpetually loading and never reaching an idle state.
The scale made this a genuine cleanup rather than a quick fix - 47,570 indexed pages meant spam content was spread across years, not a handful of obvious outliers. Semrush's backlink audit rated the domain's overall toxic score "High," with 13% of 12,745 referring domains toxic and another 20% potentially toxic. On performance, the root cause was structural: a single page load could trigger 3,500+ network requests and 48MB+ transferred, driven by prebid header bidding and dozens of ad-tech partners rather than any single fixable script.
