Webmaster Central Blog
Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index
To infinity and beyond? No!
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
When Googlebot crawls the web, it often finds what we call an "infinite space". These are very large numbers of links that usually provide little or no new content for Googlebot to index. If this happens on your site, crawling those URLs may use unnecessary bandwidth, and could result in Googlebot failing to completely index the real content on your site.
Recently, we started notifying site owners when we discover this problem on their web sites. Like most messages we send, you'll find them in
Webmaster Tools
in the Message Center. You'll probably want to know right away if Googlebot has this problem - or other problems - crawling your sites. So verify your site with Webmaster Tools, and check the Message Center every now and then.
Examples of an infinite space
The classic example of an "infinite space" is a calendar with a "Next Month" link. It may be possible to keep following those "Next Month" links forever! Of course, that's not what you want Googlebot to do. Googlebot is smart enough to figure out some of those on its own, but there are a lot of ways to create an infinite space and we may not detect all of them.
Another common scenario is websites which provide for filtering a set of search results in many ways. A shopping site might allow for finding clothing items by filtering on category, price, color, brand, style, etc. The number of possible combinations of filters can grow exponentially. This can produce thousands of URLs, all finding some subset of the items sold. This may be convenient for your users, but is not so helpful for the Googlebot, which just wants to find everything - once!
Correcting infinite space issues
Our
Webmaster Tools Help article
describes more ways infinite spaces can arise, and provides recommendations on how to avoid the problem. One fix is to eliminate whole categories of dynamically generated links using your robots.txt file.
The Help Center has lots of information on how to use robots.txt
. If you do that,
don't forget to verify that Googlebot can find all your content
some other way. Another option is to block those problematic links with a "nofollow" link attribute. If you'd like
more information on "nofollow" links
, check out the Webmaster Help Center.
Written by Torrey Hoffman, Webmaster Tools team
Hey! Rankings in mobile search results changed
April 21st, 2015
.
Check here if your site is mobile-friendly.
Labels
accessibility
10
advanced
193
AMP
2
API
2
apps
6
autocomplete
2
beginner
171
crawling and indexing
141
encryption
1
events
44
feedback and communication
74
general tips
81
geotargeting
1
Google+
1
hacked sites
8
hreflang
3
https
2
images
6
intermediate
204
interstitials
1
localization
21
malware
3
mobile
41
mobile-friendly
5
performance
11
products and services
57
search console
9
search queries
4
search results
105
security
5
sitemaps
43
structured data
11
TLDs
1
url removals
1
UX
1
verification
7
video
1
webmaster community
5
webmaster guidelines
44
webmaster tools
159
Archive
2016
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2006
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Feed
Google
on
Follow @googlewmc
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
Subscribe via email
Enter your email address:
Delivered by
FeedBurner
Hey! Rankings in mobile search results changed April 21st, 2015.
