If the Googlebot finds an unusually large number of URLs and Webpages on your blog or website with little or new content, it will classify your blog or website as existing in ‘Infinite Space’. According to a recent blog post on the office Google webmaster central blog, the webmasters tools team has now launched a new feature whereby webmasters will be notified if their blog was classified as existing in ‘Infiinite Space’. The notification will appear in the message center of the webmaster’s Google Webmasters Tools account. Here is what a notification in the message center will look like:
Infinite Space as defined by Google as
These are very large numbers of links that usually provide little or no new content for Googlebot to index. If this happens on your site, crawling those URLs may use unnecessary bandwidth, and could result in Googlebot failing to completely index the real content on your site.
Classic examples of ‘Infinite Space’ are calendars on websites and filters on websites which can technically have no new content but infinite number of distinct urls. The best way to have the Googlebot not stop indexing your blog or website due to ‘Infinite Space’ is to use the ‘nofollow’ links. Other ways to get out of the problem of ‘Infinite Space’ is to use your robots.txt file.
Even though the Googlebot can already handle situations which can lead to ‘Infinite Space’, the Webmasters Tools Team thought it would be better to let webmasters know when the Googlebot hits such ‘Infinite Space’ on their websites, so that it can be rectified and not interfere with the Googlebot indexing the website.
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