Index Bloat

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Michael Martinez: "Index bloat" is another of those ill-defined expressions that stirs people for no good reason. Google crawls trillions of URLs and indexes at least 100 billion. You are not depriving yourself or anyone else of anything by publishing content on a subdomain.
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  Nazmun Nahar: Thank you Michael Martinez. It makes sense.
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  Francois-Pierre Marcil: This is a complex question:
  
  1) Index bloat is not really a thing. Lots of URL with bad content in the index is what you are worried about?
  
  2) Are they linked, how much?
  
  3) Google says that in some cases they will associate the subdomain with the root domain. In my experience, this is extremely rare and in most cases, the two domains will stand on their own. The problem here, it would be hard to confirm either way.
• 
  Nazmun Nahar: 1. The quality of majority of the content is good
  2. They are linked barely
  
  Thank you!
• 
  Francois-Pierre Marcil: Nazmun Nahar If the content is good, then don`t think about bloat too much. I would advise that good should not be the benchmark, however. Don`t produce too much new one and improve the existing if possible as a good test.
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  Ammon Johns: Difusion, however, is a real thing.
  
  If you have a web property with, for example, 10, 000 pages, then typically only around 1% of those will be the ones with significant inbound links (citations), and only your internal links structure will be passing that around the other 99%.
  
  So, if you could condense your content carefully, taking it from 10, 000 pages down to 5, 000, without losing any significant proportion of even the long tail of search terms, and not losing any of those pages that are bringing in all the main citation power... Well, that means all that citation power (PageRank and other weighted citation metrics) are far less diffuse, and instead are similarly condensed and concentrated.
  
  Because, in the final analysis, when you do a search in Google, any result of the millions that are NOT in the first page or two of results ARE `index bloat` - sure, they pad out the index, but nobody is going to use them.
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  Nazmun Nahar: Thanks for explaing it.It`s helpful. Ammon Johns
• 
  Christopher Fleming: Ammon Johns nice to see you back!
• 
  Ash Nallawalla: How many pages does Wikipedia have in English alone? That is not index bloat. If each page satisfies a query then Google will index all such pages and serve it.
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  Nazmun Nahar: Thanks for you opinion Ash Nallawalla