Protecting Product Page Visibility For Bukalapak

Introduction

Bukalapak is a leading Indonesian Marketplace, and one of the largest ecommerce players in South-East-Asia. It has over 100 million users; 7 million partners listed on its marketplace, and 40-50 million active URLs. Organic
search is vital to the business, with 38% of users coming to the platform through this channel in 2022.

Challenge

As an ecommerce platform, the Product Description Pages (PDPs) are the most important pages on the platform. And, as a marketplace, these pages are subject to constant change at vast volume which is a full-time challenge for Bukalapak’s SEO team. From 2020 they noticed a distressing fall off in the percentage of PDPs being crawled by the Google search bots. The PDPs dropped from 60% of the total crawl distribution to 40%, meaning a dramatic decline in the findability of these products on organic search results.

Like any other Marketplace, Bukalapak is heavily reliant on User Generated Content. This is great for helping your site to rank on a lot of “long tail” keywords. But it’s also difficult to control.  They started witnessing listings and product offers that were not following Bukalapak’s Terms & Conditions. Sometimes up to 10-20M pages per month, which was a massive waste of “crawl budget” –squandering the limited allocation search engines make to crawl any given site for illegal pages. But the “snowball effect” of these disappearing pages also had a negative impact on legitimate URLs, causing Bukalapak’s SEO performance to suffer. Legality and organic search performance were in conflict.

Solution

Because of the sheer volume of pages on the Bukalapak platform, this demanded a robust cloud-based solution like Botify, able to crawl, audit at scale and provide comprehensive insights. Fixing the problem allowed Bukalapak to be both compliant legally and compliant with the search engines it depended on for traffic.

Results

The Botify platform gives Bukalapak full visibility to how these movements are affecting crawlability and subsequent performance. This allows the teams to
closely monitor the situation, and reduce its negative impact. At first such movements were over 30% of the pages being crawled, which explained the alarming shortfall. This has been brought down to beneath 10% as standard, helping Bukalapak implement a new SEO-friendly logic for its product pages, mitigating the risk from this cause and protecting their all-important organic search traffic.