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Back in 2019, I was doing a technical SEO audit for one of the largest media companies in Poland.

Among their properties was a massive furniture aggregator ecommerce site with around a million products.

Big site. But nothing unusual.

Then I opened their indexation report.

Google had 1.2 billion pages from this site in its database.

Not millions.
Billions with a B.

At first, I thought the data was wrong. But it wasn’t.

Google was crawling the site like a machine possessed. It was downloading over a terabyte of data from their servers every single day.

Every hour, the crawling looked worse.

The site structure simply didn’t have that many pages.

So where were they coming from?

The culprit was filtering.

Thousands of categories.
Dozens of filters per category.

Color × size × material × brand × price × style × availability.

Each combination generated a new URL.

Multiply that across thousands of categories, and suddenly you don’t have thousands of pages.

You have billions of crawlable combinations.

Google was wasting its crawl budget exploring an infinite maze of useless filter pages.

Meanwhile, the pages that actually mattered - the products and valuable category pages were barely getting attention.

Organic growth stalled.

And no one inside the company realized why.

We had to move fast.

First, we analyzed which filter combinations actually had search demand.

Those were allowed to stay indexable and remained in the internal linking structure.

Everything else?

We shut it down.

Within six months, we removed roughly 600 million pages from Google’s index.

Crawl efficiency improved.

Important pages started getting crawled again.

And the site’s growth came back.

Of course, around 2 years later, Google absolutely nuked aggregator sites in Poland after the May 2022 Core Update and the next ones, and the site lost a ton of traffic since then.

Still a cool case to watch out for, how filtering could kill your site performance

Most ecommerce founders never look at their crawl data.

But filtering systems quietly generate millions of useless URLs that search engines keep discovering forever.

It’s one of the fastest ways to destroy SEO performance without realizing it.

Reply to this email with “Filter” and your e-commerce domain.

I’ll take a look at your ecommerce site and check if your technical SEO or filtering setup is silently killing your rankings.