I’m auditing the indexing problems on an ecommerce site, and would appreciate a second opinion from people who have handled large URL consolidations.
The Google Search Console Pages report currently shows:
- 6,120 crawled, currently not indexed
- 519 discovered, currently not indexed
- 182 404s
- 115 duplicates with no user-selected canonical
- 27 cases where Google chose a different canonical
- 3 server errors
- 3,451 URLs blocked by robots.txt
- 236 alternate pages with a canonical declared elsewhere
- 52 redirecting URLs
The main issue seems to be that several generations of the catalog URL structure are still accessible at the same time.
Examples include:
/pl/p/{product-name}/{id}/en_US/producer/{brand}/{id}/artykuly-pismienne/…/artykuly-pismiennicze/…/akcesoria-pismienne/…/akcesoria-pismiennicze/…/writting-instruments/…/accessories/…
Many products, categories and brand pages appear under multiple URL structures. Up to 6,781 of the 6,966 URLs requiring action fall within these affected URL families.
My approach is:
- Choose one final URL structure for each language.
- Build redirects at entity level using product, category and brand IDs;
- Redirect each legacy URL directly to its exact equivalent.
- Leave URLs without a legitimate equivalent as 404 or 410 rather than redirecting them to a generic category.
- Update internal links, canonicals and XML sitemaps in the same deployment.
- Add self-referencing canonicals to all indexable final URLs.
- Add
hreflang between Polish and English equivalents.
There is also a spelling decision to make:
/writting-instruments/
The typo appears in at least 240 sampled excluded URLs and is used in the current navigation. I’m thinking whether to correct it to:
/writing-instruments/
during the same consolidation, or retain it temporarily to reduce migration scope. If corrected, all old URLs would redirect directly to the correctly spelled final destination, without passing through the typo'ed URL(s).
Another area I still need to investigate is the 236 “alternate page with proper canonical” URLs. Some appear to be Polish and English versions of the same pages, so I’m planning to review a stratified sample and check whether:
- same-language duplicate variants are canonicalized correctly;
- legacy URLs should be redirected instead;
- Polish pages are incorrectly canonicalizing to English pages;
- translations lack self-canonicals or
hreflang.
The site also has 3,451 faceted-navigation URLs blocked through robots.txt. I think the best way is to retain that setup and reduce the number of crawlable internal links rather than switch everything to noindex, since Google would need to crawl those URLs.
My main questions:
- Is this level of URL fragmentation enough to explain most of the “crawled, currently not indexed” volume, or would you expect another issue alongside it?
- Would you consolidate the legacy structures, fix the English spelling and update canonicals, internal links and sitemaps in one coordinated deployment?
- Would you separate the spelling correction into a later migration if the typoed URLs already have traffic or backlinks?
- For translated PL/EN pages, would you always use self-canonicals plus
hreflang, assuming the main content is correctly translated?
- Are there any major risks or validation steps I’m missing before generating the redirect map?
I’d appreciate feedback from anyone who has consolidated several generations of ecommerce URLs without causing redirect chains, soft 404s or a temporary drop in indexing
Thanks