Qasa's homes, found under its own name.

Every home on Qasa was also listed on its sister site, Blocket Bostad, so Google had to guess which page counted. We pointed Google to Qasa without switching Blocket off, and by January 2024 both sites drew far more non-brand clicks.

See the results

Client: Qasa
Industry: Rental housing marketplace
Markets: Sweden
Period: Ten weeks in spring 2023, measured January 2024 against January 2023Spring 2023, Jan 2024
Our part: Technical SEO: canonicals, site structure, internal links, rendering
Award: Silver, 2024. Best use of search - Real Estate & Property, small.Official 2024 winners

Qasa's page of apartments to rent in Stockholm, with a map of listings and two apartment cards, open on a laptop on a birch coffee table in an empty, freshly painted flat with moving boxes and a set of keys. — Apartments to rent in Stockholm on qasa.se: a city and a home type, the kind of page built to win.

Challenge

Two sites, one set of homes.

In 2023 Qasa ran Sweden's largest second-hand rental platform: homes for students, young adults priced out of buying, and anyone who has to move fast.

For several years the supply of homes on Qasa had grown, and organic search had not grown with it. The searches that mattered were plain: available housing, housing in a city, an apartment in Stockholm. Each of them is contested by large rental agencies.

Underneath sat a decision made for business reasons. When Qasa was acquired by the owner of Blocket, one of Sweden's biggest marketplaces, its whole platform and range were copied to bostad.blocket.se. Every home had two pages on two domains, and merging, redirecting or removing either site was ruled out.

What we found

A hint was enough.

The usual fix for a duplicate site is an order: redirect it, or take it out of the index. Both were off the table, so we gave Google a hint instead.

We started by ranking, not fixing. Nearly thirty bounded tasks, each ordered by how badly it held the site back, went to Qasa's developers as we wrote them, so work began on the first while we specified the next. New fixes shipped almost every week.

The same question ran through qasa.se itself. The pages built to win, a type of home in a named city, had to be the ones Google indexed and preferred, so we tightened the canonical rules, made the structure legible through internal links and improved the server-side rendering: the page Google was asked to choose arrived ready to read.

Then the twin. Every page on bostad.blocket.se got a canonical tag pointing to its match on qasa.se. Google treats the tag as a hint about which page is the original, not as an order, and we bet on exactly that: where Blocket's brand was strong it would stay, and where Google was uncertain it would lean to Qasa.

It was not the textbook answer. Blocket could have lost traffic, and we accepted that risk: the plan going forward was Qasa.

When the ten weeks ended, about half the tasks were live, among them every one at the top of the list. What it asked of Qasa was its developers' time, week after week, and trust in a setup that was not the obvious one.

Two sites, one page that countsFrom one shared range to the page Google should choose.

qasa.se
In 2023, Sweden's largest range of second-hand rentals, and the site the business was building.
bostad.blocket.se
In 2023, the same homes, page for page, under one of Sweden's strongest brands.

01 Rank
Rank the work before fixing it
1. Specify the tasks
  Nearly thirty bounded tasks, each ordered by how badly it held the site back.
2. Hand them over as they come
  Qasa's developers start on the first while the next is written. Fixes ship almost every week.
02 qasa.se
Make the right page the obvious one
1. Canonical rules
  Clearer rules for which page counts, so Google prioritises the one meant to rank.
2. Internal links
  A structure that shows which pages matter: a type of home in a named city.
3. Server-side rendering
  The prioritised pages arrive assembled, ready for Google to read.
03 Blocket
Point the twin at the original
1. Canonical tags from Blocket
  Every page on bostad.blocket.se pointed to its match on qasa.se. A hint, not an order.
2. Leave the close calls to Google
  Where Blocket's brand was strong, it could stay. Where Google was uncertain, it leant to Qasa.
Out Results
Evaluate, then keep
1. Watch the results
  Within weeks, pages that ranked for the wrong reasons dropped out, and the pages meant to rank took their place.
Every search has one page that counts.

The work

Screens are qasa.se as captured on 25 September 2026, shown in staged scenes.

Qasa's page of homes to rent in Göteborg, with listings and a map of the city, on a monitor on a birch desk against a pale blue wall. — A landing page for a city: Göteborg.

Qasa's page of apartments to rent in Malmö on a phone lying on a herringbone oak floor next to a set of keys. — City and home type together: apartments in Malmö, on mobile.

Qasa's sitemap page for Stockholm County, listing every municipality and every home type in the county, on a tablet lying on a moving box. — The sitemap links every municipality and home type, so each page can be crawled.

Qasa's home page with a band of city names, Stockholm, Göteborg, Helsingborg and more, on a laptop on a marble kitchen table at dusk. — Internal links from the home page to the city pages.

The result

The bet held, on both sites.

Measurement notes

In January 2024, qasa.se had about five times the non-brand clicks from Google of January 2023, and bostad.blocket.se about two and a half times.

The first sign came a couple of weeks in: pages that had ranked for the wrong reasons dropped out of the results, and the pages we wanted Google to prioritise took their place. Ahrefs' estimate of Qasa's organic traffic, flat for years, turned upward at the start of the project and kept rising into 2024.

Blocket was the part we had been ready to lose. Its non-brand clicks rose as well: less than Qasa's, as the canonical tags would lead you to expect, but more than we had expected. After the evaluation in early 2024 the setup stayed; Blocket Bostad has since become part of Qasa.

We don't split Qasa's rise between the fixes. The tags and the work on qasa.se shipped in the same weeks, so the figure belongs to all of it, and one January against the last is a single month; the notes below say what it covers.

Non-brand clicks to qasa.se, about 5,200 to 26,300: +404%
Non-brand clicks to bostad.blocket.se, about 3,300 to 8,100: +149%

January 2024 against January 2023, year on year. Non-brand clicks, Google Search Console.

Measurement notes and definitions

Sources: Google Search Console for clicks and impressions, one property per domain. Ahrefs' estimate of organic traffic for the shape of the curve only.
Scope: Organic Google search to qasa.se and to bostad.blocket.se, non-brand queries only, each domain measured on its own.
Window: 1 to 31 January 2024 against 1 to 31 January 2023. The ten-week project ran in spring 2023, from early March.
Excluded: Brand queries. Paid search is not in Search Console data.

Measurement notes and definitions
Period	Jan 2023	Jan 2024
qasa.se, clicks	5,215	26,328
qasa.se, impressions	372,400	898,500
bostad.blocket.se, clicks	3,258	8,116
bostad.blocket.se, impressions	380,000	675,200

Jan 2023

qasa.se, clicks: 5,215
qasa.se, impressions: 372,400
bostad.blocket.se, clicks: 3,258
bostad.blocket.se, impressions: 380,000

Jan 2024

qasa.se, clicks: 26,328
qasa.se, impressions: 898,500
bostad.blocket.se, clicks: 8,116
bostad.blocket.se, impressions: 675,200

Google Search Console, non-brand search overviews for qasa.se and bostad.blocket.se, as submitted with the European Search Awards 2024 entry.

One month against the same month a year earlier. The overviews give January 2024 and the change (+404.9% and +149.1% in clicks, +141.3% and +77.7% in impressions); the January 2023 values are calculated from them, impressions to the nearest hundred. Which brand terms are excluded is not stated. The canonical tags and the work on qasa.se shipped in the same weeks, so the rise is not split between them.

What this case says

Decide which page counts.

When two sites carry the same range, search picks one page for you. The work is making sure it picks the one you are building.

The textbook answer is to merge or redirect, and a business does not always allow it. A hint is weaker than an order, but it can be enough: both brands stay in the results, and search gets a reason to prefer the one you are betting on.