The impact of website structure & quality on indexing

by Giorgi Aptsiauri
Published 22/06/2025

Post updated
25/06/2025

Website Structure

A well-organized website allows search engines to effectively crawl (explore and understand) your site’s structure and content, which helps them discover, index, and rank valuable pages on search engine results pages (SERPs).

In contrast, a poorly structured or overly complex website can hinder this process, waste your website’s allocated crawl budget, and reduce its visibility in search results.

Your website architecture can either help or prevent Google from efficiently allocating crawl resources.

What Is Crawl Budget?

Crawl budget refers to the number of pages Googlebot crawls within a certain timeframe on a specific site. This budget is not unlimited, so it’s crucial to understand how Google or other search engines discover new content, links, and updates.

Factors such as website speed, frequency of content updates, content quality, and domain authority (DA) can all influence how Google distributes its crawl resources.

The relationship between content quality and crawl budget is an often overlooked but important SEO topic. It’s known that Google sets a quality threshold for indexing.

For example, Google can use a method called “fingerprinting” based on the structure of your URLs and ignore those it considers low-value. This process is fully automated and handled by Google’s algorithms.

What is URL Fingerprinting?

URL fingerprinting is a process Google uses to analyze and categorize web pages based on their URL structure.

This method helps Google identify patterns that may indicate content quality, relevance, and uniqueness.

By analyzing structural elements of URLs—such as directory navigation, query parameters, and naming conventions—Google’s algorithms can estimate whether a page contains valuable or duplicate content.

This evaluation plays a crucial role in deciding whether a page is worth crawling, indexing, and eventually ranking.

You’ll often see this behavior on websites that publish large numbers of URLs in bulk, especially when the content is generated by scripts or AI tools.

How Google Uses URL Fingerprinting

Google’s primary goal when indexing content is to improve user experience by delivering relevant, high-quality search results.

URL fingerprinting acts as a filter to screen out low-quality content before valuable crawl resources are consumed.

For instance, Google may identify URL patterns linked to dynamically generated pages that offer little unique value (e.g., session IDs, tracking parameters), and treat them as low-priority for crawling.

Let’s say your website grows from 2,000 URLs to 3,000 overnight. This significantly increases the site’s crawl load. Google will start reviewing the new URLs and, through its algorithm, determine that a portion of them are low-quality or duplicate content.

It will then pre-evaluate and exclude these links from active crawling, preserving crawl resources for high-quality content that delivers better results for users.

Symptoms in Google Search Console

This situation often shows up in two common indexing statuses in Google Search Console:

Crawled – currently not indexed
Discovered – currently not indexed

Crawled – Currently Not Indexed
You’ve likely encountered the status “Crawled – currently not indexed” in Search Console. This means Googlebot visited and reviewed the page, but chose not to include it in the index.

This is often due to:

Low-quality content: The page may not meet Google’s quality standards and could be considered incomplete, duplicate, or low-value for users.
Technical issues: There could be problems preventing indexing, such as improper use of noindex tags or restrictions in robots.txt.
Staleness: URLs may fall out of the index if freshness and updates are key ranking factors for the search terms the URL targets.

Discovered – Currently Not Indexed
This status means Google knows about the URL (likely from your sitemap or internal links) but hasn’t crawled or indexed it yet.

This is usually caused by:

Crawl budget limitations: On large websites, Google may prioritize which pages to crawl based on structure, importance, or content value. As a result, some discovered pages wait longer before indexing.
Low priority: Google may assess certain pages or their navigation paths as lower priority compared to others, based on multiple signals.
Temporary technical issues: Server downtime or errors during crawling can delay a page from being indexed, leaving it in a “discovered” but not indexed state.

Conclusion

Your website’s structure plays a critical role in how search engines crawl and index your content.

A well-planned and clearly structured site helps distribute crawl resources efficiently, ensuring that high-value content is easily found, indexed, and ranked.

In contrast, a disorganized site (see: Top 10 mistakes when building a website) can waste valuable resources and harm your online visibility.

Understanding crawl budget and the factors that influence it—such as site speed, content updates, structural quality, and domain authority (DA)—is essential to how Google evaluates your site.