Google's John Mueller was asked why Google continues to crawl tons of pages on a large website but indexes only four of them, and why the home page isn't indexed. John categorized the site as a "large product aggregator."
The question was "Googlebot has crawled ponito.com 1.17M times in the last few weeks, but Google still won’t even index the homepage. Search Console shows only 4 indexed URLs total. Is there any known reason Google would crawl a site this heavily but refuse to index even the homepage?"
Here is a screenshot of the crawl stats from Google Search Console of this site - notice the spike in crawling activity:
Here is the page indexing report, showing only four pages indexed out of the 180,000 pages:
John Mueller from Google responded on Bluesky saying pointing out two issues - a technical issue with redirects and an issue with overally programmatic SEO quality.
(1) He said, "a bunch of the URLs that are indexed from your site, they all redirect to the homepage, so it seems like there are still some big technical issues that you need to resolve on your site."
(2) In general, another large product aggregator like this is not trivial to make & maintain well. You end up with a ton of URLs, apparently with programmatic, autogenerated content. Convincing search engines that this is worthwhile, convincing users that this is valuable, will be hard.
Google is generally not a fan of programmatic SEO, as an FYI.
Here are these posts:
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
