Google's John Mueller said that if you submit all your search pages, i.e. search results, tags, categories (I guess), to Google, it will make "crawling & indexing significantly harder for large sites." He said this on Twitter the other day, adding "this is where smaller sites can prioritize much better than larger ones can."
This is part of a set of tweets, so you can see the context of this statement:
IMO some of these pages are more like category pages, which can be fine (they're useful for users). Finding the balance between indexing everything (creating a lot of cruft & making crawling impossible) and not indexing everything (hiding things people are searching for) is hard.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 22, 2020
It doesn't have anything to do with large enough -- if anything, submitting all search pages make crawling & indexing significantly harder for large sites. IMO this is where smaller sites can prioritize much better than larger ones can.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 22, 2020
But yea, SEOs job it to help Google focus in on the content on a site that drives the biggest ROI for the site. Google tries its best, sometimes it gets it wrong, to crawl and index what it thinks it should. But SEOs can help sites get in shape to help Google figure out what to crawl and index.
This may be related to issues this site is having.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
