When a store’s real product pages get crawled slowly while Search Console fills up with URLs nobody recognises, that’s a classic sign of crawl budget being spent in the wrong place. On a WooCommerce project I took over, the culprit traced back to a past malware infection that had generated thousands of indexable junk URLs.
Diagnosing the cause
Using Search Console’s Pages report and a full crawl, I mapped the URL patterns the malware had created and confirmed they were all dead ends — no real content, but perfectly crawlable.
Crawl budget is finite: every junk URL a bot crawls is a real page it does not. On a large store, that difference shows up directly in how quickly new and updated products get indexed.
The cleanup
I removed and blocked the malicious URL patterns, returned the right status codes (410 for gone, 301 where a real destination existed), tightened robots rules, and regenerated clean XML sitemaps that only listed pages worth indexing.
Then I corrected the Search Console configuration and used the removals tool to speed up dropping the worst offenders from the index.
Protecting crawl budget going forward
The last step was preventative: hardening the site, monitoring index coverage, and setting up alerts so a spike in indexed URLs gets caught early rather than months later.
The result was a clean, efficient crawl focused on pages that actually matter — and a stable technical foundation for future SEO growth.