SEO for Big Websites: Handling Crawl Budget & Index Bloat w/ Patryk Wawok Ernesto Ortiz interviews technical SEO specialist Patryk Wawok about managing crawling and indexing for large websites. They stress that fundamentals (robots.txt, noindex, monitoring) matter at any size because even small sites can bloat via filters, parameters, and migrations. Patryk shares case studies reducing index bloat by removing or redirecting low-quality and out-of-stock product pages, weighing redirects vs 410s (backlinks, UX, and crawl budget impacts), and using robots.txt disallow after redirects to speed URL removal. They discuss handling Shopify limitations, product variants (index colors, consolidate sizes), and using Product Group structured data so many variants can share one URL while still working in Merchant Center. The conversation also covers internal linking pitfalls on mobile, site structure to avoid deep pagination, collection page content strategies for AI Overviews, branding as “entity” SEO, and KPIs focused on revenue/leads rather than vanity traffic.
Follow Ernesto Ortiz on Social Media:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ernesto-ortiz-seo-expert/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbhjjBiyM1RBS_GZcZx30gw
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theernestoortiz/
X: https://x.com/Ernesto58395599
Follow Ernesto's SEO Agency, Structural SEO:
Website: https://structuralseo.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/100778951/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCmJc1vbm1UnC9ACMPMuVFQg
X: https://x.com/StructuralSEO
Follow Patryk Wawok:
Patryk's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wawok-patryk-seo/
Patryk's SEO agency: https://organichackers.com/
We Talk About:
00:43 Crawl Index Basics
03:00 Quality Density Wins
03:53 Out of Stock Cleanup
07:35 Redirects vs 410
10:41 410 vs 404 Explained
11:38 Disallow After Redirects
15:49 Redirect Timing Signals
20:00 Shopify Variants Strategy
26:42 Branding as Entity SEO
28:15 Building Brand Demand
34:52 Sitemaps for Stock Status
37:21 Out of Stock Edge Cases
39:29 Out of Stock SEO Dilemma
40:46 Merchant Center Compliance
42:41 Internal Linking Essentials
45:10 Pagination and Site Structure
47:29 Scaling Collection Pages
51:57 Writing Collection Page Content
58:53 Mega Menu Link Strategy
01:00:21 Why Content Wins Fast
01:06:10 AI Overviews and B2B SEO
01:08:54 KPIs Beyond Traffic
01:11:57 Back to SEO Basics
01:15:23 Cost of Retrieval Theory
