Google was crawling 340,000 URLs to find 11,000 products.
Faceted navigation had multiplied the catalog thirty times over. Most of the store had never been indexed at all, and the agency’s answer had been to write more category descriptions.
Read this first
An anonymized engagement.Sector, catalog size, crawl figures and index coverage are real and come from their server logs and Search Console. The company name is not. The log analysis is reproducible by anyone with access to the same files, which is the point of publishing the method rather than the brand.
The complaint
Organic revenue had been flat for three years while the catalog had roughly doubled. Every new product line arrived, got photographed, got written up, went live, and then did nothing. The working theory inside the business was that the market had gotten more competitive. That is almost always the working theory, and it is almost always the least interesting explanation available.
The site was fast. The product pages were good — genuinely good, with real photography and specifications somebody who knew the category had written. There was nothing wrong with the thing itself. The problem was that Google was spending its entire budget somewhere else.
How eleven thousand becomes three hundred thousand
This is the part that makes faceted navigation such a durable problem: nothing about it looks broken. Every one of those pages loaded. Every one returned a 200. Every one had products on it and a title tag and a working add-to-cart. A person clicking around the site would never find a fault, which is precisely why it had survived four years and two agencies.
What the logs said
Nobody needed to take my word for any of this. It is a server log, it was on their own hosting, and the analysis is a afternoon with a text file and a spreadsheet. I have never understood why this is treated as an advanced technique. It is reading.
They were not losing to competitors. Two thirds of the shop had never opened.
The fix, and how boring it was
- Block the facet parameters in robots.txt and add canonical tags pointing filtered views back at the clean category.
- Regenerate the sitemap from the product database rather than from the CMS’s idea of what pages exist.
- Add internal links from category pages to products that had no path in from anywhere — roughly four thousand of them had none at all.
- Leave the content alone. The product pages were already better than the ones ranking above them. They just could not be reached.
What I would tell you to check
- Count the URLs in your sitemap, then count your products. If the first number is more than about one and a half times the second, find out why before you do anything else.
- Open Search Console and look at index coverage. Specifically the excluded tab, specifically “crawled — currently not indexed.”
- Ask your developer whether filter links are crawlable. The answer is usually yes, and usually nobody has ever asked.
- Get thirty days of server logs. They are free, they are already being written, and they will tell you what the search engine actually does rather than what you hope it does.
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