A marketplace site owner came to me with indexation and cannibalization problems during the spring of 2025. Six months after the fixes, organic clicks had more than doubled, while the number of URLs Google could index went down.
Where the site started
- Its templates, plus invalid URLs that returned 200, made the number of indexable URLs effectively unlimited.
- A large share of the URLs in its sitemaps were never crawled.
- Individual listings were linked from the homepage.
- Internal links had been added in bulk.
What we changed
The fixes ran in a fixed order over six months: the indexation policy first, then crawl control, internal links and content.
Indexation policy and facets
Every page type got one rule: delete, noindex, canonicalize, paginate or block. Low-value facet variants were removed, deeply stacked filter combinations were noindexed, and paginated directory pages got explicit pagination rules.
Crawl control
URLs that could not be validated now return 404, and sections with no search value were blocked in robots.txt.
Internal links
Links moved from individual listings to category pages, and expired listings were redirected only to categories that are indexable.
Content
Redundant content was removed or noindexed, and the blog was reorganized into purpose-driven sections.
Results
Google Search Console, the six months after the changes compared with the six months before:
| Metric | Change |
|---|---|
| Clicks | +109% |
| Impressions | +34% |
| Click-through rate | 2% to 3.2% |
| Average position | 15.5 to 9.8 |
Clicks grew three times faster than impressions. The pages that stayed in the index ranked higher, which lifted click-through rate more than it lifted reach.
What made the difference
Most of the gain came from cutting the indexable URL count. Once the index held only pages with search demand and live listings, Google ranked those pages higher and clicks followed. The full method, step by step, is in the marketplace SEO guide.
If your marketplace shows the same symptoms, see how I work on marketplace SEO.