- Google’s crawl team filed a bug directly with WooCommerce regarding add-to-cart URL parameters that were doubling the site URL, and the fix shipped quickly.
- Two other plugins with open crawl issues remain unfixed.
- Action parameters accounted for roughly 25% of all crawl issues.
Google’s crawl team filed a bug against WooCommerce for add-to-cart parameters wasting crawl budget. WooCommerce fixed it. Other plugins haven’t.
Google’s crawl team has been filing bugs directly against WordPress plugins that waste crawl budget at scale.
Gary Illyes, Analyst at Google, shared the details on the latest Search Off the Record podcast. His team filed an issue against WooCommerce after identifying its add-to-cart URL parameters as a top source of crawl waste. WooCommerce picked up the bug and fixed it quickly.
Not every plugin developer has been as responsive. An issue filed against a separate action-parameter plugin is still sitting unclaimed. And Google says its outreach to the developer of a commercial calendar plugin that generates infinite URL paths fell on deaf ears.
What Google Found
The details come from Google’s internal year-end crawl issue report, which Illyes reviewed during the podcast with fellow Google Search Relations team member Martin Splitt.