Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site

[Saurabh Sharma]

I keep getting the "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site" message in the google webmaster tool for one of the sites that I manage. I have e-commerce website so i guess it's normal for any e-commerce website having high number of URL's.

how do I address this problem?

[aakk9999]

Is this message something that started to appear recently? If so, have you done any changes to the site in a few weeks before this message appeared?

You may often get this message when the site has a technical problem where the same page can be viewed under many different URLs.

The first thing you need to determine is whether the number of URLs that Google is seeing is way bigger than the number of pages you think the site should have.

Although not really reliable, I would start with "site:" command and see what number is being returned.

I would also take a sentence of what I would believe is a unique text (not a boilerplate text on product page!) on few of site pages and search for this in quotes. If there are multiple pages returned, then this may compound the issue.

Also, the combination of "site:" and "inurl:" commands may uncover more URLs than just "site:" command as Google tends to return more granular data in these cases.