Crawl Budget Optimization

Why It Matters

Google allocates finite crawl budget per site. Wasted budget on duplicate, low-quality, or useless pages means important pages get crawled less frequently, delaying indexing and hurting rankings. Optimization can improve indexing speed by 50-80% on large sites.

How It Works

Crawl budget is determined by site popularity, page speed, and crawl health. Optimization involves blocking low-value pages via robots.txt, fixing crawl errors, improving site speed, using sitemaps strategically, and implementing proper redirects to guide crawlers to valuable content.

Use Cases

• An e-commerce site with 500K products blocks faceted navigation URLs, improving product page crawl frequency from monthly to weekly
• A news site fixes infinite scroll pagination, reducing wasted crawl on duplicate pages by 70%
• A large directory optimizes internal linking, ensuring new listings get crawled within 24 hours vs 30 days previously

Best Practices

• Block low-value pages with robots.txt: admin pages, search results, filtered URLs, duplicate content
• Fix crawl errors (404s, 500s) immediately as they waste crawl budget and signal poor site health
• Improve site speed to increase crawl rate - faster sites get crawled more aggressively
• Use XML sitemaps strategically for important pages, exclude low-priority pages
• Implement proper 301 redirects avoiding redirect chains that waste crawl resources
• Monitor crawl stats in Search Console to identify budget-wasting patterns