“Indexed, Though Blocked by robots.txt”: What Google Really Means (And What Ecommerce Sites Should Do About It)
If Google Search Console is flagging thousands of URLs as “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt,” it’s often not a ranking crisis—it’s a signal your site is generating crawlable URL variants (like add-to-cart parameters). Here’s how indexing can happen without crawling, what risks are real, and a practical plan for ecommerce teams to control parameters without breaking SEO or UX.