<b>Index bloat is not a crawl problem you can crawl your way out of</b>

<b>Index bloat is not a crawl problem you can crawl your way out of</b>

Thousands of low-value URLs in the index, and the instinct is to manage the crawler harder. But index bloat isn't caused by over-crawling, it's caused by over-<i>publishing</i> crawlable junk, and tuning crawl frequency won't remove a single bloated URL.

The mechanism is upstream: thin tag pages, search-results pages indexed by accident, parameter duplicates, paginated archives going to infinity. Google crawled them because you made them reachable and returned 200. The crawl is a symptom.

The cure is editorial subtraction: consolidate, noindex, 410, or stop generating the pages at the template level. Once the bloat is gone, crawl distribution fixes itself, because there's less garbage to spend it on.

You don't have a crawler that's too generous. You have a site that's too noisy.