How to index 300k products on WooCommerce site?

Close to 300k products, don't know if we should index product pages?

[jwiere]

I'm dealing with a WooCommerce site that generally has between 250,000 and 300,000 active products. I believe they update inventory once a week and generally, there are a few products going in or out of stock, so it does fluctuate. A lot of their products have little to no competition online for the specific product name or serial number, so just being indexed would bring in traffic. And they do show up well for some of their products.

However, in GSC it looks like they never get over 28k indexed. Seeing a lot of "Discovered - currently not indexed", and "Crawled - currently not indexed". I'm assuming that it's not realistic to get each of these product pages indexed and that we should no-index the product pages and just try to get the catalog pages indexed? That is how they used to be setup. Not for SEO, I believe just because the original creators never finished the product pages. They had all info and add to cart buttons on the catalog pages and didn't even have individual product pages. But I'm worried if we do it that way then a product might be on /shop/44 one day and then /shop/88 the next when they update inventory.

I feel like getting each product page indexed is too much but the location on the shop catalog will vary too much to be reliable. Most of the sites I work on are 20 pages or less, I'm at a loss on how to handle something with around 300k active pages/products?

[Andy Langton]

You would certainly want to get the product pages indexed. You've identified the problem (that they aren't getting indexed) but you haven't identified why they aren't being indexed. There could be numerous reasons for this, e.g.

- Poor internal link structure
- Lack of external links
- Wrong robots exclusion settings
- Poor product page content or code
- Other technical issues, e.g. canonicalisation, bad status codes

It would certainly be unusual for an e-commerce site to not want products indexed at all, although in most cases catalogue/category pages have a higher "performance per page". So, if you absolutely had to choose one or the other, you would likely choose categories over products but that would be an unusual choice to make!

[Dimitri]

If Google is not indexing all the page, in spite of knowing them, it means that Google "considers" that the site is not providing rich enough content, to deserve indexing all the pages individually. Content for each of these products might be too thin, or too similar, ... in other words Google might not see the point of indexing all the pages, and decides to index only a sample of them.

[not2easy]

It is possible that the product pages have canonicals that point to the 'wrong' URL. It is easy to do in WP because of the multiple versions created internally. I would look at all 'versions' of product page URLs to determine whether that needs adjustment.

[jwiere]

"It would certainly be unusual for an e-commerce site to not want products indexed at all, although in most cases catalogue/category pages have a higher "performance per page". So, if you absolutely had to choose one or the other, you would likely choose categories over products but that would be an unusual choice to make!"

Ideally, we could get the individual product pages all indexed if for no other reason then it would be best for the user to go from SERP to the individual page they want without getting distracted by other products. But for a year or more they just had catalog pages with 12 items per page (broke by row, just 1 column) and the"Add to cart" button was right on this page. They don't have a lot of content per product, as Dimitri mentioned possibly part of the reason they aren't getting indexed? Would a page with 12 products (each with very little content) be more likely to get indexed just because it's content X 12 (or whatever)? Plus it would greatly reduce the number of pages we would need to be indexed.

I have recently fixed a few technical errors, I know we got about another 1k page indexed recently and a few other fixes were more recent and am still waiting to see the outcome..