Auditing a large ecommerce site with 18,000 URLs
An anonymised ecommerce site (~18,000 URLs)
39
Before
68
After
Illustrative teardown built from representative audit patterns, not a named client. See our real before/after case study →
At 18,000 URLs, this store's biggest SEO problem wasn't content — it was that most of those URLs shouldn't have existed in the index at all. Faceted navigation and filter combinations had multiplied the page count, scattering authority and crawl budget across near-duplicate pages while real products sat orphaned. Here's what the audit found and what changed.
What the audit found
~18,000
Crawled URLs
The vast majority were filter and sort combinations of a few hundred real product and category pages.
1,100+
Deep orphaned products
Genuine product pages sitting 5+ clicks deep with no contextual inbound links, drowned out by faceted URLs.
~70%
Authority lost to facets
Most internal links pointed at filtered listing variants instead of canonical category and product pages.
40
Internal links to add
High-impact links to surface real products and concentrate authority on canonical pages.
What was changed
The kind of links added
82
Health
B+
Grade
Strong structure with a few high-impact internal links to add. Acting on the list below could unlock a meaningful lift in organic visibility.
Internal links to add
Anchor: “best-selling model”
Placement: Paragraph 3, sentence 2
Anchor: “new arrivals”
Placement: Intro paragraph
Anchor: “Pro Model”
Placement: Paragraph 5, sentence 1
14
Quick wins
12
Orphan pages
9
Anchor gaps
The problem: 18,000 URLs, a few hundred that matter
Large ecommerce sites rarely have a content problem — they have a structure problem at scale. Faceted navigation (colour, size, price, sort) generates thousands of URL variants of the same handful of real pages. Each variant absorbs internal links and crawl budget, so search engines spend their attention on near-duplicates while the actual products go shallow and orphaned. This store had over 1,100 genuine products effectively invisible in its own link graph.
The fix: concentrate, don't multiply
The lever on a site this size isn't adding links everywhere — it's stopping authority from leaking into filtered variants and routing it deliberately to canonical pages. The audit prioritised the links that surface real products and connect categories, and flagged where faceted URLs were soaking up internal authority that belonged on the pages that convert.
The result
Structural health moved from 39 to 68 as authority refocused on canonical product and category pages and over a thousand deep products re-entered a meaningful link graph. At this scale a periodic re-crawl matters most — new facets and seasonal lines reintroduce the same dilution if left unchecked.
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