We looked at a year of crawls across 1,100 sites. Most indexation problems were not caused by content at all.
Every audit tool tells you how many pages are not indexed. Very few tell you why. So we went back through a year of crawls from 1,100 sites and traced every excluded URL to its cause.
Most of it is plumbing
Two thirds of indexation debt came from templates, not content: parameter pages without canonicals, pagination that loops, and filters that generate thousands of thin URLs.
Indexation debt is a plumbing problem long before it is a writing problem.
What to fix first
- Canonicals on every filtered and sorted URL
- One clean pagination pattern per template
- A sitemap that only lists pages you want ranked
Takeaways
Fix the templates, then the content. One template change often clears more excluded pages than a month of rewriting.
