What Is Index Bloat & How Does It Affect My Website

Index bloat happens when there is a situation whereby there are too many pages on a website that are indexed in search engines. Your site bloats search engine indices and this leads to Google indexing a large number of poor-quality pages which is a huge waste of time. 

SocialPulsar is one of the best SEO agency in San Francisco offers a wide range of digital marketing services that assure the best of results. As one of the top SEO consultants in San Francisco, we have been offering our SEO solutions with utmost diligence. Having the expertise to deal with and even avoid occurrences like Index Bloat, we help our clients plan and execute SEO campaigns of all scopes and scales. 

SEO issues related to Index Bloat

Index Bloat can lead to an exhausting of the crawl budget. It badly affects the organic quality of the domain and leads to a lowering of the ranking potential of other pages. In certain scenarios and specific situations, some websites become prone to having too many pages indexed. These scenarios include: 

• The use of URL parameters in e-commerce Sites can lead to this. The introduction of product filtering or re-ordering can lead to possible URL variations. 

• The problem can occur in medium to large websites with a lot of pages that may not necessarily have to be indexed. 

• It can happen with sites that have been blogging for quite some time. Block tags and archive pages can lead to the bloating of search engine indices. 

• When a redesigning process of migration of the site occurs, it is not uncommon to find a lot of dev or test pages left over. This too can create the problem. 

Finding sources of Index Bloat 

One of the best ways to find Index Bloat is to have your website thoroughly audited by SEO experts like SocialPulsar. This gives a comprehensive picture of your website, history, and also your business goals. Another way by which you can track Index Bloat is to use an Index Bloat Guide that helps you complete very specific checks. 

How to resolve Index Bloat?

Resolving Index Bloat can be a slow and tiring process. You will have to delete pages from Google’s index one by one and no doubt, this process will consume a lot of your time and energy. Again, this would also depend on the severity of the bloat. It also relies on the CMS limitations of your Site and the kind of SEO strategy that you have already employed. If you haven’t arrived at a keyword strategy yet, then that is the first thing to do before initiating an on-page SEO or Link Building campaign. 

It’s easier said than done. Resolving Index Bloat is an activity that includes directing search engines to de-index your pages, manually. If you are up to this without proper guidance and strategy, it will only lead to a significant fall in your rankings. So always rely on experts to do this for you. For any help in this regard or your other digital marketing activities, feel free to contact SocialPulsar. Our experts will be more than delighted to assist you.