Index Bloat

What is index bloat?

In a nutshell it’s when search engines crawl areas of your site they don’t really need to.

Within ecommerce this can commonly be

  • Search pages
  • Multiple pages for the same product (if pages are canonicalized correctly).
  • Pages with low quality content
  • pages with no content at all
  • pages linked to your checkout

The list can go on!

What’s the harm with a bit of bloat?

Websites, like our own stomachs, perform better without bloat. Index bloat can cause your website problems such as :

  • duplicate content page ranking over the original intended page, leading to the intended pages performance suffering in the rankings.
  • old products that are no longer available out ranking newer items that are for sale.
  • leads to cannibalisation of other pages.
  • uses up a lot of your crawl budget. Crawl budget is the total number of pages a search engine is willing to crawl.

How to fix the website bloat?

Speak to a reputable SEO about a regular site audit who can keep an eye on how google (and the other search engines) crawl your site. They can help you identify. if your website has any duplicate content issues which are causing search engines some problems with your site content.

You will need to deal with these pages by removing them all together or by blocking them from search engines.

If you have staff employed the SEO may be willing to work with your in house staff and get them to help with a lot of the fixes, which may save you a small fortune.


Image courtesy of: People photo created by 8photo – www.freepik.com

Tags:
Leave a Comment