zsty.us

Before / After · Case Study

cbd.domains — the cannabis work moved to its own showcase so it can't tax everyone else

  • Hemp / CBD

Search and ad platforms judge a whole website by its riskiest content, so publishing cannabis case studies next to everything else quietly dragged on every other brand's visibility. The cannabis portfolio now lives on its own site under its own company — a complete copy of the main showcase's machinery, re-dressed in an afternoon, free to lean into its niche without hedging.

“The engine is the product twice over: once as this site, and once as the fork that keeps cannabis receipts from taxing everyone else's rankings.”
Showcase (live)↗Repo → og-gitclaw/cbd-domains↗
🔒cbd-domains.vercel.app
jackiej.events — modern site

At a glance

What this rebuild covers.

  • Search visibility

    Search and ad platforms classify whole websites, not single pages — walling the cannabis catalog off on its own address means the other brands' rankings and ad eligibility never inherit the high-risk label.

  • Agents

    Eight agents rebranded the entire fork at the same time, each owning its own separate slice of the files — the whole brand swap landed in one pass without a single conflicting edit.

  • Design

    Rather than building a second site from scratch, the showcase is a full copy of the flagship engine — it started at complete feature parity, and every future improvement to the engine carries over.

  • Email

    The brand sends and receives email from its own mail domain, kept apart from the other properties for the same reputation reasons the website was.

Receipts — measured

Numbers that moved.

0
Parallel rebrand agents (disjoint file clusters)
was 0
2
Engines maintained for two branded properties
was 2
1
High-risk case studies left on the general domain
was 1
  • 2 branded sites, 1 engine to maintain
  • 8 agents rebranded it in parallel
  • 0 high-risk case studies left on the main site
  • Full search kit live from day one

The story

Problem · Insight · Build · Outcome.

  1. 01 · Problem

    The best receipts were the riskiest to publish.

    The portfolio's deepest case studies — BMH, Buck Mountain, cbd.restaurant, Porto Verde — are cannabis. Publishing them all on the general-purpose domain meant the strongest work actively taxed every other property's search classification.

  2. 02 · Insight

    Fork the engine; segregate the risk; keep one codebase pattern.

    The before/after engine was already the portfolio's most valuable artifact. Forking it wholesale — rather than building a second site — means every engine improvement is portable, and the cannabis property starts at full feature parity on day one.

  3. 03 · Build

    Eight parallel agents, one rebrand, then the SEO layer.

    Fork of the zsty-us monorepo → 8-agent disjoint-cluster rebrand → cannabis /seo engine, generated OG cards, sitemap/robots, org schema, hub cross-links, llms.txt. Brand email on the self-hosted Stalwart server; the property sits under Candles and Clones LLC.

  4. 04 · Pending

    The apex is the last mile.

    cbd.domains (the apex) isn't yet attached to the Vercel project — it currently serves a stray lander — so the showcase runs at cbd-domains.vercel.app until the domain is added and DNS pointed. One console action away.

For the technically curiousHow it was done
  1. 01

    Where it started

    The portfolio's deepest case studies — the hemp retailer, the cannabis farm, the restaurant brand, the extraction lab — are all cannabis. Publishing them on the general-purpose showcase meant the strongest work actively raised the risk classification of the domain carrying every other property's story.

  2. 02

    The insight

    Search and ad platforms classify domains, not pages, so the fix is segregation as architecture: give the cannabis catalog its own domain under its own legal entity. And rather than building a second site, fork the before/after engine wholesale — the new property starts at full feature parity on day one, and every engine improvement stays portable between the two.

  3. 03

    The eight-agent rebrand

    The fork was rebranded by eight agents running simultaneously, each owning a disjoint cluster of files — brand tokens, copy, page metadata, search surfaces, assets — so the entire re-skin landed in one integration pass with zero merge conflicts. The rebrand itself became a case study in parallel agent work.

  4. 04

    The search layer

    The programmatic search engine was retuned for the cannabis sector and shipped live: sector pages, a generated social-preview card for every page, sitemap and crawler rules, organization schema, cross-links back to the hub, and a discovery file for AI crawlers — the full discovery surface in a single release.

  5. 05

    What runs now, and the last mile

    The showcase runs live on a temporary address on our hosting platform, with brand email on its own self-hosted mail domain and the property held under its own company. The one remaining step is the apex: cbd.domains currently serves a stray placeholder page and is a single console action away from pointing at the new site.

Architecture

Old stack
  • One domain, mixed risk
  • Cannabis + general content entangled
↓
New stack
  • zsty.us — general portfolio
  • cbd.domains — high-risk fork
  • Shared engine, separate entities
  • Cannabis /seo + OG + schema

What changed, with evidence

Agent backbone

An eight-agent parallel rebrand with zero merge conflicts

The fork was rebranded by eight agents running simultaneously, each owning a disjoint cluster of files — brand tokens, copy, metadata, SEO surfaces, assets — so the whole rebrand landed in one pass without a single conflicting edit. The engine fork itself is the case study: the same machinery that runs zsty.us, re-skinned in an afternoon of parallel work.

  • 8 agents, disjoint file-cluster ownership, one integration pass
  • Full brand swap: tokens, copy, OG, schema, llms.txt
Retention

Risk segregation as an SEO strategy

Search and ad platforms classify domains, not pages. Keeping cannabis case studies on their own domain under their own LLC means the general portfolio's rankings, ads eligibility, and email reputation never inherit the high-risk classification — and the cannabis showcase can lean into its niche without hedging.

Before
Every cannabis receipt published raised the whole domain's risk profile.
After
Two properties, two classifications, one shared engine.
Agent backbone

The cannabis /seo engine, live

The programmatic /seo machinery (sector × city pages) runs on the fork tuned for cannabis: sector pages live, generated OG cards per page, sitemap/robots, Organization schema, hub cross-links, and llms.txt for AI-crawler discovery — the full discovery surface, shipped in PR #1.

  • Cannabis /seo merged + live
  • Per-page generated OG cards; sitemap + robots + org schema + llms.txt

← All rebuilds

cbd.domains — the cannabis work moved to its own showcase so it can't tax everyone else — zsty.us