Mueller: fix indexed URLs that redirect to the homepage first
Summary
A site crawled heavily but barely indexed can look like a crawl budget or quality problem when its indexed URLs simply redirect to the homepage. Google's Mueller flagged that first, then the autogenerated inventory.
Fetch every URL the Pages report calls indexed before judging the site's content. Until generated pages answer at their own addresses with their own content, Google's treatment of them proves nothing.
Googlebot crawled ponito.com 1.17 million times in a few weeks while Search Console showed four indexed URLs and no indexed homepage, according to the question put to Google’s John Mueller and written up by Search Engine Roundtable. The site’s page indexing report set those four against roughly 180,000 pages. Mueller’s reply on Bluesky, quoted in that write-up, did not touch crawl volume at all. He looked at the four: “a bunch of the URLs that are indexed from your site, they all redirect to the homepage, so it seems like there are still some big technical issues that you need to resolve on your site.”
The redirect detail changes what the number four means. A URL that redirects to the homepage no longer serves its own content, because Google follows the redirect and treats the homepage as the destination. Mueller’s reply does not put it this way, but a site whose indexed URLs all resolve somewhere else has not yet handed Google anything to judge. The count describes redirect behavior, not a verdict on 180,000 pages.
Before reading a low indexed count as a judgment, export the URLs the Pages report lists as indexed and request each one, following redirects. Either a URL returns 200 with its own content or it lands on the homepage, and the second case is a plumbing fault with a known fix. Search Console reports what the site and the submitted URL set tell it to report, which is also why splitting a sitemap moves the report without moving the indexing.
Mueller’s second point was about the inventory rather than the plumbing. A large product aggregator is not trivial to build or maintain well, he wrote, and it ends up with a great many URLs of apparently autogenerated content, which makes convincing both search engines and users that the pages are worthwhile hard. Barry Schwartz, who runs Search Engine Roundtable, added his own note that Google is generally not a fan of programmatic SEO. Google’s own spam messaging has moved the same way, with scaled content now ranked above link spam as a priority.
Those are two separate problems, and the safer order is Mueller’s. The redirect fault is cheap to find and cheap to prove fixed, and it blocks the other question: until the generated URLs return their own content at their own addresses, nothing Google does with them says anything about whether it finds them valuable. The value question is the expensive one, and it only becomes answerable after the first is closed out.
What to do
- Pull every URL the Pages report calls indexed, fetch each with redirects visible, and note which ones end at the homepage.
- Run the homepage through URL Inspection’s live test. Confirm it returns 200, canonicals to itself, and is not itself the target of a catch-all rule.
- Find what produces the homepage redirects. A catch-all for missing or empty inventory is the usual culprit on aggregators, and the correct response for a URL with nothing behind it is a 404, not a bounce to the root.
- Only then sample the generated pages and ask what each one offers beyond the feed data it was built from. Cutting the ones with no answer is faster than asking Google to index all of them.
- Do not read the crawl spike as approval. Heavy crawling of a large autogenerated URL space sits happily alongside near-zero indexing, so crawl stats are not a health check here.