Taming “Index Bloat”: A Technical SEO & Faceted Navigation Overhaul
Client: A large electronics retailer with 50,000+ SKUs on a complex Magento build.
Challenges We Faced
The client’s massive, complex Magento store was an SEO “nightmare,” costing them millions in lost revenue:
Faceted Navigation Optimization Failure
Their product filters (e.g., ?brand=, ?color=, ?size=) were creating millions of unique, crawlable URLs.
“Index Bloat”
A Comprehensive Category Page Audit found Google was indexing over 3 million pages, but only 100,000 were valuable.
Wasted Crawl Budget
Google was spending all its time crawling “thin” filter pages instead of their main category and product pages.
Duplicate Content
The 3M+ indexed pages were all 99% duplicate content, which was killing their site’s overall authority.
Poor Internal Linking
Key category and product pages were not linked properly, making it hard for Google to prioritize important pages.
Tame Your Technical SEO
“Is faceted navigation creating duplicate content? Our technical e commerce category optimisation services are built to fix complex stores.”
Our Approach – How We Solved These Challenges
Comprehensive Category Page Audit
We used Screaming Frog to crawl all 3M+ URLs and identify the exact URL parameters causing the duplicate content.
Faceted Navigation Optimization
This was 90% of the work. Our e commerce category optimization company implemented a dynamic rel=”canonical” tag strategy to point all filtered URLs back to their main, “clean” category page.
Technical SEO
We used robots.txt to block Google from crawling the most problematic filter combinations.
We used Google Search Console’s URL Parameter tool to tell Google how to handle the remaining parameters.
Internal Linking & Silo Structure
We fixed the crawl budget, which allowed Google to find and index their new, high-value category pages faster.
Results
| Metric | Before | After | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google-Indexed Pages | 3,200,000 (bloated) | 150,000 (healthy) | -95% (Crawl Budget Focused) |
| Crawl Budget (Pages/Day) | 10k (wasted) | 45k (focused on key pages) | +350% |
| Organic Revenue (Site-wide) | $500,000/mo | $1,100,000/mo | +120% |
Free Technical SEO Audit
“Not sure why your store has index bloat? Book a Free Technical SEO Audit and let our e commerce category optimization company find your errors!”
Advice for Marketers & Brand Owners
- Faceted Navigation Optimization is the most complex (and important) part of e-commerce SEO.
- You must use canonical tags and robots.txt to control your filters. Do not let Google index every possible combination.
- “Index Bloat” kills your rankings. A good e commerce category optimization company will reduce your indexed pages, focusing Google’s power on the pages that matter.
- Use Screaming Frog and Google Search Console to find and monitor your technical issues.
Extra Factors That Made It Work
- A close partnership with the client’s development team was critical to implementing the complex canonical logic.
- The robots.txt disallow rules immediately saved crawl budget, allowing Google to find and index 10,000+ “orphaned” product pages.
