What is Index Bloat? How does it affect SEO?

Index Bloat is a serious issue your website may be facing that can lead to important pages not getting indexed and rather irrelevant & unnecessary pages being indexed.

But what is it anyway?

Let me explain with an example; index bloat means when unnecessary pages like tag pages, archives, date archives, and paginate pages from your website are indexed on Google which also by the way creates a lot of content duplication issues.

Google will only index so many pages from your website, if your website is having a disproportionate amount of pages then it may choose to not index a lot of pages.

Frustratingly enough it may happen that the blog post may not get indexed but rather the blog post's tag page may get indexed or worse, both may get indexed but the tag page will outrank the blog post ??

You have to ask yourself a question here, which page generates more SEO value? Tag page or blog post? It is always a blog post that will be more valuable

The answer to fixing this issue is to noindex & follow irrelevant pages like tag pages, archives, paginated pages, author archives, and more.

In fact, if you are facing this issue and if you head to Google Search Console → Coverage Report you will find there discovered but currently not indexed issue.

That means that you have submitted the page in the sitemap but Google has still not indexed and that pages could be a year-old or so; this indicates that Google values your tag page or pagination page more than a page that can add value and that's a shame.

Your website can miss out on serious traffic if this issue is left unchecked.

Another way for you to check this issue is to use the Google Search Operator command, this one to be precise, site:yourwebsite.com and export the SERP report using SEOQuake and now go through the excel and look for pages that shouldn't be in the index.

To take a step further, one more element that I would like to add to index bloat is perhaps also removing zombie pages as Brian Dean likes to call it.

What are Zombie Pages?

Relax, nothing spooky here. Zombie pages simply mean pages that are lying rampant and not bringing any organic value at all or hardly bringing any organic value.

Your Business Website could be writing thousands of blogs but not all blogs make it to driving traffic owing to poorly written content that isn't optimized for search.

Two things to do here, remove it altogether; just get rid of it or find opportunities to consolidate some of those into a giant pillar content and rework the content according to the current market demand.

Either way, you may have to get rid of a lot of content while you perform this content audit.

And this eventually contributes to fixing the index bloat that your website is facing.

I hope this clarifies the concept of index bloat to you and has managed to add some value to you.