Index Bloat in SEO: Causes, Effects, and How to Fix It

Index bloat is a pervasive issue in the SEO world, where websites are plagued by excessive low-value pages indexed by search engines. 

These pages often lack unique content, are generated dynamically through faceted navigation or pagination, or are the result of internal search results.

Moreover, these SEO issues can negatively impact conversion rates and technical SEO scores, which can restrain a website’s ability to attract and engage with its target audience. 

Therefore, this article will discuss the causes and effects, as well as the strategies to identify and address this SEO problem. 

What Is Index Bloat SEO?

Index bloat is a condition when a website's search engine index includes too many pages, most of which offer little to no value to users. 

This happens when search engines like Google index many irrelevant, redundant, or low-quality pages from a website. It can negatively affect a site's SEO by overextending the crawl budget and reducing the overall quality assessment of the site by search engines.

The main causes of it are usually technical issues on the website. For example, dynamically generated URLs from search functions, session IDs, or pagination can create numerous unnecessary pages. 

Additionally, having too many pages with thin content, such as product pages with minimal unique information or blog posts that provide little value, can also contribute to this problem.

Why Index Bloat Harm Website?

Index bloat can harm a website in several ways. First, it can waste the crawl budget. Search engines allocate a specific amount of resources to crawl a website, and if a large portion of this budget is spent on low-value pages, important pages might be crawled less often. 

Second, it can negatively impact search rankings. Search engines aim to provide the best user experience, and a site with many low-quality pages might be seen as less valuable, potentially lowering its overall ranking.

How to Identify Index Bloat?

Recognizing the symptoms of this problem is essential for maintaining your website's health and performance. 

To identify index bloat, you should know some of the key indicators, such as a significant drop in website performance, slower page loading times, and a decrease in organic search rankings. 

This can happen because search engines process a large number of unnecessary pages, which dilutes the focus on your core content and leads to keyword cannibalization, where multiple pages compete for the same keywords.

Another sign of this issue is having an unusually high number of indexed pages compared to the actual number of valuable content pages on your site. This discrepancy often results from technical issues, like improper use of tags or indexing private pages, such as user accounts or shopping carts. 

To effectively diagnose this problem, you can regularly audit your site’s index status using tools like Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. 

These tools provide insights into how search engines view your site, helping you identify unnecessary pages and take corrective action to ensure that search engines and users find your content valuable and relevant.

How to Fix Index Bloat SEO

After identifying which unneeded pages are indexed by Google, you can decide how to manage them and request their removal from Google’s search results. Here are some ways to fix this problem:

1. Remove Internal Links

If you intend to set pages to noindex, you can start by removing internal links to those pages to limit Google's ability to find and index them. 

Since Google uses internal links to discover new content, removing these links will redirect Google's attention to other internal links on your site.

For pages you plan to delete, removing internal links minimizes the risk of broken links and provides an opportunity to link to more relevant content that you want Google to index.

2. Update or Install Robot.txt

Create a robots.txt file if your site doesn't have one. Then, you should regularly review and update the directives in your existing robots.txt file to ensure search crawlers visit the correct pages.

A robots.txt file can block search engine bots from accessing certain parts of your site such as blocking Google from crawling user-generated search results and preventing it from indexing thousands of unwanted pages.

3. Use Meta Robots Tags and X Robots

The robots meta tag can be added to an HTML document to control how an individual page is crawled without altering the site-wide robots.txt file. 

It allows you to specify instructions for specific crawlers like "Googlebot" or "bingbot" and exclude pages from image, video, and news searches.

The X-Robots tag is an HTTP header that functions similarly to the meta robots tag, managing the indexing of images, videos, PDFs, and other non-HTML files.

4. Add Canonical Tags

Canonical tags help ensure Google doesn't index all instances of similar or duplicate content. Placing these tags in the header of a webpage tells Google which URL should be considered the master copy for search results.

5. Fix Pagination

For related content divided across multiple pages, use pagination best practices so Google understands their relationships. 

Create a single master page, such as a "view all" page for a product category spread across several pages, and add a canonical tag to this master page to ensure it is indexed instead of partial listings.

6. Remove or Consolidate Pages

Content that performs poorly and attracts little organic traffic, such as outdated pages or pages with similar content, also contributes to the problem.

Before deleting pages, create a plan. Thoughtful content pruning is necessary to avoid negatively impacting SEO and site authority. 

A content audit can help determine whether to merge pages and consolidate keywords or remove them altogether. 

Use permanent redirects to ensure users don’t land on dead pages and to carry over any link equity the pages have built up.

7. Remove Indexed Pages With URL Removal Tool

You can request the removal of specific URLs from Google using Google Search Console. Select ‘Removals’ on the left-hand side, then click ‘New Request’ and enter your URL. 

Note that you have about six months to delete the URL or set it to noindex. If you fail to update your robots.txt or meta robots tag, Google will crawl and index the page again. 

Also, don’t forget to remove internal links pointing to any page you want removed from Google’s index.

Conclusion

By understanding the cause and effects of index bloat, and implementing strategies to address it, website owners and SEO professionals can optimize their crawl budget, improve user experience, and enhance their search engine rankings. 

However, this could be a challenging task, especially for the website owners since you also need to focus on creating high-quality content for your audience. 

In this case, you can rely on SEO Services by cmlabs to help you with these SEO issues. At cmlabs, multidisciplinary teams of specialists are ready to help you build your online presence.

Share your needs with us and be ready to increase your business now!