Google’s crawl staff has been submitting bugs immediately towards WordPress plugins that waste crawl price range at scale.
Gary Illyes, Analyst at Google, shared the main points on the most recent Search Off the File podcast. His staff filed a difficulty towards WooCommerce after figuring out its add-to-cart URL parameters as a prime supply of crawl waste. WooCommerce picked up the bug and glued it shortly.
Not each plugin developer has been as responsive. A problem filed towards a separate action-parameter plugin continues to be sitting unclaimed. And Google says its outreach to the developer of a business calendar plugin that generates infinite URL paths fell on deaf ears.
What Google Discovered
The main points come from Google’s inner year-end crawl subject report, which Illyes reviewed throughout the podcast with fellow Google Search Relations staff member Martin Splitt.
Motion parameters accounted for roughly 25% of all crawl points reported in 2025. Solely faceted navigation ranked greater, at 50%. Collectively, these two classes signify about three-quarters of each crawl subject Google flagged final 12 months.
The issue with motion parameters is that every one creates what seems to be a brand new URL by including textual content like ?add_to_cart=true. Parameters can stack, doubling or tripling the crawlable URL house on a web site.
Illyes stated these parameters are sometimes injected by CMS plugins slightly than constructed deliberately by web site house owners.
The WooCommerce Repair
Google’s crawl staff filed a bug report towards the plugin, flagging the add-to-cart parameter habits as a supply of crawl waste affecting websites at scale.
Illyes describes how they recognized the problem:
“So we’d attempt to dig into like the place are these coming from after which typically you’ll be able to establish that maybe these motion parameters are coming from WordPress plug-ins as a result of WordPress is kind of a preferred CMS content material administration system. And you then would discover that sure, these plugins are those that add to cart and add to want listing.”
After which what you’ll do should you have been a Gary is to attempt to see if they’re open supply within the sense that they’ve a repository the place you’ll be able to report bugs and points and in each of those circumstances the reply was sure. So we’d file points towards these uh plugins.”
WooCommerce responded and shipped a repair. Illyes famous the turnaround was quick, however different plugin builders with related points haven’t responded. Illyes didn’t title the opposite plugins.
He added:
“What I actually, actually beloved is that the nice people at Woolcommerce nearly instantly picked up the problem and so they solved it.”
Why This Issues
This is identical URL parameter drawback Illyes warned about earlier than and continued flagging. Google then formalized its faceted navigation pointers into official documentation and revised its URL parameter greatest practices.
The information exhibits these warnings and documentation updates didn’t resolve the issue as a result of the identical points nonetheless dominate crawl studies.
The crawl waste is commonly baked into the plugin layer. That creates an actual bind for web sites with ecommerce plugins. Your crawl issues is probably not your fault, however they’re nonetheless your duty to handle.
Illyes stated Googlebot can’t decide whether or not a URL house is beneficial “until it crawled a big chunk of that URL house.” By the point you discover the server pressure, the injury is already occurring.
Google constantly recommends robots.txt, as blocking parameter URLs proactively is simpler than ready for signs.
Trying Forward
Google submitting bugs towards open-source plugins may assist scale back crawl waste on the supply. The total podcast episode with Illyes and Splitt is accessible with a transcript.
