What Is Crawl Budget (and When to Care)

The words crawl budget might sound like a headache. But put simply: it’s how many pages Google is willing to check out on your site within a certain timeframe.

If you’re running a small site with a few hundred pages? You probably don’t need to worry, Google will likely crawl everything that’s important just fine.

But if you’re managing a massive site with loads of pages — like an ecommerce site with hundreds of products or filters — then the crawl budget starts to matter a lot more. You want Google spending time on the right pages, not irrelevant ones.

What Affects Crawl Budget

Speed is a big one - if your site loads fast, Google can crawl more pages in less time.

If you’ve got broken links or crawl errors everywhere, you’re wasting crawl time on stuff that leads nowhere.

Google also pays attention to how your pages link together. If a page is easy to get to and linked from lots of other important places on your site, it’s more likely to get crawled often.

And the more established and regularly updated your site is, the more crawl budget you’re likely to get.

Crawl Budget Waste

Things like tag pages, archive pages, or filters that generate endless URL combinations - well, those can eat up your crawl budget pretty fast without offering anything valuable.

Duplicate content across loads of similar pages? That’s another common issue.

Then there’s infinite scroll or poor pagination setups that create a mess of endless links for crawlers to follow - it’s just not helpful.

Optimizing for Efficient Crawling

Use your robots.txt file to block off parts of your site that crawlers don’t need, like admin areas or thank you pages.

Stick a noindex tag on pages that users need but that don’t need to show up in Google, like internal search results.

Keep your sitemap clean and focused on the good stuff - basically, the pages that actually matter.