The signal did not come from a blog post or a policy update.
It surfaced during a recent episode of Google’s Search Off the Record podcast, where Gary Illyes from Google’s Search Relations team shared a year-end analysis of crawl issues seen across the web. What stood out was not just the scale of the problem but also its source.
According to Illyes, Google’s crawl team has begun filing bug reports directly against WordPress plugins when they identify patterns that generate large amounts of crawl waste. These are not isolated edge cases. They are repeatable behaviors embedded into widely used software.
In other words, some crawl problems are no longer created page by page. They are created at the plugin level.
When plugins quietly create infinite websites
During the podcast, Illyes explained how Google reviews crawl issue reports submitted by site owners and then categorizes them internally. Over time, clear patterns have emerged. Illyes added,
“A large chunk of the issues that we looked at is related to faceted navigation… It’s close to 50% of the total reports that we got. And action parameters, they are making up close to 25 % of the reports.”
Together, these two categories account for the majority of crawl issues Google’s team encounters.
How plugins turn features into crawl traps?
What connects many of these cases is their origin. Modern WordPress sites rely on plugins to handle eCommerce, filtering, calendars and personalization.
These features often work by appending parameters to URLs or dynamically generating new paths.
Left unchecked, those parameters can multiply. A single page can generate thousands of crawlable URL variations, many of which produce identical or near-empty content. Googlebot cannot determine that those URLs are low-value without crawling enough of them to recognize the pattern.
By then, crawl budget has already been spent. Illyes cited a real-world example that illustrates how this pattern plays out at scale.
How a WooCommerce bug exposed a web-wide crawl problem?
One of the clearest cases Illyes shared involved WooCommerce.
Google’s crawl data showed that certain add-to-cart URL parameters generated by the plugin could be stacked, dramatically increasing the number of crawlable URLs without adding new content. Illyes explained,
“If you just add only one of these, like add to cart, that immediately doubled your URL space… add one more and you have triple.”
From Google’s perspective, this was a textbook source of crawl waste. Instead of treating it as a site-level issue, Illyes said his team filed a bug report directly against the plugin. WooCommerce reviewed the issue and fixed it quickly.
The outcome mattered beyond any single site. A plugin-level fix reduced crawl waste across thousands of WordPress installations at once.
For Google, it was a more effective solution than handling the problem individually at the crawl system level.
WooCommerce’s response shows what is possible, but it also underscores how uneven outcomes can be when crawl issues originate in third-party software.
Not every crawl issue can be resolved at its origin. The unresolved cases expose the practical limits of fixing crawl waste upstream.
The limits of fixing crawl waste at the source
Other cases have not been resolved as cleanly.
Illyes also described plugins that generate effectively infinite URL spaces, such as calendar tools that create new pages for every possible date. He said,
“WordPress plugin was, still is, injecting URLs that are completely bogus and basically generating calendar infinite spaces on every single path that they can.”
In some instances, these plugins are commercial products with no public issue tracker. Outreach went unanswered. The crawl problems remained.
That dynamic creates an imbalance. A single plugin decision can introduce crawl traps across the web, while the responsibility for managing the fallout still lands on individual site owners.
Google cannot determine that a URL space is low-value without first crawling it. Those traps continue to consume crawl resources well before they can be deprioritized.
That imbalance also exposes a deeper limitation in how search engines handle crawl waste, one that explains why bad URLs cannot simply be ignored.
Why Google cannot simply ignore bad URLs?
A common assumption is that Google can just skip useless URLs.
The reality, as Illyes explained, is more constrained. Googlebot cannot determine that a URL space is worthless until it has crawled enough of it to recognize the pattern. That discovery process requires exploration and exploration consumes resources.
If a site suddenly exposes millions of new URLs through parameters or dynamic paths, Googlebot will attempt to understand them. Only after detecting signals of redundancy or server strain does it begin to back off.
This is why Google continues to emphasize proactive controls, such as blocking problematic URL patterns in robots.txt. Waiting until crawl stats look unhealthy often means the damage is already done.
What does this mean for site owners?
The larger shift is not about WooCommerce or any single plugin.
It is about how crawl performance is increasingly shaped upstream, by software choices rather than deliberate SEO website structure decisions. As WordPress ecosystems grow more modular, technical SEO becomes less about manual configuration and more about plugin hygiene.
That shift also raises the importance of hosting environments that provide deeper control and visibility. With Bluehost VPS hosting, for example, site owners have root access, server-level log visibility and direct control over files like robots.txt. This makes it easier to identify and manage crawl behavior introduced by plugins.
Illyes’ comments signal a quiet change in how Google is approaching the problem. When crawl waste appears at scale, the fix may start with the software that introduced it.
For site owners, the takeaway is practical. Plugins accelerate development. Platforms expand reach. But ownership still lives at the infrastructure level. Understanding how plugins generate URLs, parameters and crawl paths is now part of maintaining a healthy site.
Final thoughts: A quiet shift in crawl governance
There was no announcement and no ranking update tied to this change.
But Google’s crawl team filing bugs against WordPress plugins reflects an evolving reality. Crawl efficiency is no longer just a best practice. It is a shared responsibility between platforms, plugin developers and site owners.
Discovery still happens on platforms. Growth still compounds on websites. And increasingly, the health of that growth depends on structuring website that prevents structural crawl waste before it spreads.
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