Catalogue Index Bloat Audit

Large catalogues accumulate indexable junk from pagination, sort orders, session tokens, tracking parameters, and abandoned facet paths. The count itself is not the harm - the harm is crawl attention spread across pages that will never rank, so refreshed prices and new stock get picked up slowly. Deindexing indiscriminately is worse than the bloat, because some of those URLs are earning revenue.

The skill file

---
name: catalogue-index-bloat-audit
description: Use when Search Console reports far more indexed URLs than you have products and categories, and rankings on core pages have drifted down.
---

# Catalogue Index Bloat Audit

Large catalogues accumulate indexable junk from pagination, sort orders, session tokens, tracking parameters, and abandoned facet paths. The count itself is not the harm - the harm is crawl attention spread across pages that will never rank, so refreshed prices and new stock get picked up slowly. Deindexing indiscriminately is worse than the bloat, because some of those URLs are earning revenue.

## What you need first

- Search Console page indexing export and crawl stats
- a full crawl of the site at reasonable depth
- organic landing page data for the last 6 months

## Method

1. Compare indexed URL count against your true page count from the database. A ratio above roughly three to one on a stable catalogue means bloat rather than legitimate depth.
2. Join the indexed URL list against organic landing pages. URLs indexed for 6 months with zero organic entrances are the removal shortlist - everything else stays until proven otherwise.
3. Classify the shortlist by generating pattern before touching anything: pagination, sorts, tracking parameters, dead facets, orphaned old products. Fix the generator, not the individual URLs.
4. Strip tracking parameters at the edge with a redirect to the clean URL, rather than canonicalising them, so they stop being crawled at all.
5. Leave paginated pages self-canonical and indexable but ensure they carry no unique copy. Canonicalising page 2 onwards to page 1 orphans the deeper products from crawl discovery.
6. Re-measure crawl stats at 8 weeks. Success is a rising share of crawl requests hitting product and category URLs, not a lower indexed number on its own.

## What this produces

A pattern-level remediation plan showing which URL generators to fix, with the removal shortlist filtered by zero organic entrances.

## Where this goes wrong

- canonicalising paginated pages to page one, which cuts crawl paths to products that appear only on deeper pages
- deindexing by pattern without checking landing page data first and killing URLs that were quietly converting
- treating a lower index count as the win when crawl allocation to money pages has not actually improved

---

From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/catalogue-index-bloat-audit

What you need first

• Search Console page indexing export and crawl stats
• a full crawl of the site at reasonable depth
• organic landing page data for the last 6 months

Method

1. 01 Compare indexed URL count against your true page count from the database. A ratio above roughly three to one on a stable catalogue means bloat rather than legitimate depth.
2. 02 Join the indexed URL list against organic landing pages. URLs indexed for 6 months with zero organic entrances are the removal shortlist - everything else stays until proven otherwise.
3. 03 Classify the shortlist by generating pattern before touching anything: pagination, sorts, tracking parameters, dead facets, orphaned old products. Fix the generator, not the individual URLs.
4. 04 Strip tracking parameters at the edge with a redirect to the clean URL, rather than canonicalising them, so they stop being crawled at all.
5. 05 Leave paginated pages self-canonical and indexable but ensure they carry no unique copy. Canonicalising page 2 onwards to page 1 orphans the deeper products from crawl discovery.
6. 06 Re-measure crawl stats at 8 weeks. Success is a rising share of crawl requests hitting product and category URLs, not a lower indexed number on its own.

What this produces

A pattern-level remediation plan showing which URL generators to fix, with the removal shortlist filtered by zero organic entrances.

Where this goes wrong

• canonicalising paginated pages to page one, which cuts crawl paths to products that appear only on deeper pages
• deindexing by pattern without checking landing page data first and killing URLs that were quietly converting
• treating a lower index count as the win when crawl allocation to money pages has not actually improved

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