Index Bloat
Index bloat is having a large number of low-value pages indexed — thin, duplicate or auto-generated URLs that attract no traffic. It wastes crawl budget and can weigh down the quality assessment of the whole site.
It typically arrives via faceted navigation, tag archives, internal search results, or programmatic pages generated for combinations nobody searches for. Each individually looks harmless.
The remedy is pruning: identify pages with no impressions over a meaningful period, then either make them substantially better or remove them. Deleting weak content reliably improves the performance of what remains, which surprises people.
Why it matters
The specific risk in any large programmatic build — location pages, service-by-city pages — and the reason those should only be generated where genuinely distinct content exists.
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