Index Bloat
In one sentence
A large number of low-value, duplicated or empty pages sitting in the index and diluting the site's standing.
Analogy Mental model
A library stuffed with books nobody reads, with the good ones buried at the back.
In practice What you actually do
Compare the number of URLs you publish with the number indexed. Faceted navigation, tag archives, paginated thin pages and parameter permutations are the usual sources. Noindex or canonicalise them deliberately, then verify the count falls.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Volume for its own sake reads as low quality at site level, and site-level judgements reach the pages that deserved better. The fix is subtraction, which is harder to justify internally than publishing.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →