Pruning the bottom 25% of programmatic URLs by quality lifted 'Submitted and indexed' rates by a mean of 31 percentage points within 6 weeks across 5 audited agency sites.
We removed (noindex + sitemap-strip) the lowest 25% of programmatic URLs on each of 5 Canadian SMB sites, scored on a composite of internal-link count, unique fact density, and time-on-page. After 6 weeks, the GSC 'submitted and indexed' rate had risen by a mean of 31 percentage points. The 'discovered – not indexed' bucket halved on average.
Methodology
5-site pruning intervention, GSC index-coverage tracking, 6-week window, Q1 2026.
Limits of this finding
Pruning improves crawl-budget allocation; the lift on remaining URLs is real but the discarded URLs also lose any tail traffic they had.
More Technical findings
Pages whose primary content was JavaScript-rendered (visible only after hydration) were retrieved less often by RAG-based LLMs than equivalent server-rendered pages.
We mirrored 6 SPA pages as prerendered HTML on the same domain. Retrieval inclusion (the LLM citing or summarising the content at all) rose by roughly 2x on the prerendered variants over a 3-week window.
Removing JSON-LD that contradicted visible page content lifted Rich Results Test pass rates and removed manual-action risk in the 9 cases we audited.
Across 9 client sites, we removed inflated AggregateRating, FAQ entries with no visible answer, and Service entries for services not actually offered. Subsequent Search Console manual-action notices that had been pending dropped to zero.
Canadian sites with INP (Interaction to Next Paint) above 200ms see roughly 22% lower SERP click-through compared to sub-200ms peers in our matched-pair sample.
We matched 64 Canadian SMB sites into pairs by industry, query intent, and serp position, then segmented by INP performance. The sub-200ms cohort had a mean CTR of 4.1%; the >200ms cohort 3.2% — a roughly 22% relative gap. INP became Google's third Core Web Vital in March 2024; this is the first full year where its ranking weight has been observably material in our data.
Run experiments like this on your site.
Senior-led measurement plans, hand-counted, no laundered numbers.
Book a strategy call