When a large number of pages on a website offer little or no value to the search engine user, then the search engine calls it index bloat. Meaning they are not informative (not valuable) and relevant in terms of content. Technical problems can occur because of some things like dynamically generated URLs, session IDs, or even pagination.
This issue results in search engines indexing low-quality, redundant, and irrelevant pages. When Search Engines are unable to crawl effectively, they spend their precious time and energy on irrelevant pages. This can be caused by a variety of issues, like malicious attacking subdomains, internal site searches, or advertisement banners on your web pages.
Causes of Index Bloat.
- When a website generates URLs dynamically through search functions or session IDs.
- When the website has too many thin content pages, such as product pages having less unique content.
- Whenever there is duplicate content due to bad URL parameter handling.
Impacts of Index Bloat on Website.
- Website crawling budgets get wasted, and low indexing frequency of key pages.
- A drastic drop in search ranking due to site quality.
How to Identify Index Bloat.
- To find index bloat, check the number of indexed pages through tools like Google Search Console.
- Check for the cause of the discrepancy between the desired number of indexed pages and the actual number.
How to Prevent Index Bloat.
- Put in place a strong robots.txt file and the correct meta tags not to index pages.
- Run audits and clean up low-quality content regularly.
- Having canonical tags can help tackle the issue of duplicate content.
- When websites understand and resolve index bloat, they end up with a streamlined index that meets their SEO goals.
