The client-proof workflow → E-commerce catalogs
Index Coverage Audits for Large E-commerce Catalogs
A 60,000-URL store is not one indexing question. It's five or six of them wearing one sitemap — and the audit that treats the catalog as a single list produces a number nobody can act on. "73% indexed" means nothing. "Products 94%, categories 88%, pagination 12%" is a work plan.
Scope by template, not by domain
Split the URL inventory before checking anything: category pages, product pages, pagination, filters and facets, editorial. Each template has its own fate in the index and its own fix when coverage drops. The split usually comes straight from URL patterns; where it doesn't, a crawl export plus the sitemap does it — the free sitemap URL extractor turns sitemap files into checkable lists in seconds.
What each template's misses usually mean
- Products out of the index — thin descriptions shared across variants, out-of-stock handling returning 200 with empty content, canonicals pointing at parent variants. Product-card specifics are covered in the e-commerce indexing guide.
- Categories out — usually internal linking (orphaned mid-tier categories) or near-duplicate intros pasted across dozens of pages.
- Pagination out — often deliberate and fine. The question is only whether products reachable exclusively through deep pages still have another crawl path.
- Facets in — the inverse problem: thousands of filter combinations indexed that shouldn't be, eating crawl capacity. Google's guidance on crawl budget for large sites is the reference here.
Running the check at catalog scale
Batch tasks take up to 100,000 links per .txt file, so even a full-catalog baseline is one or two runs. After the baseline, full checks are for milestones — replatforming, migrations, template rollouts. Between milestones, per-template samples do the monitoring at a fraction of the cost; the methodology is on the sampling page.