Crawl Budget Optimisation: A Guide for Large Sites

Crawl budget matters most for large sites — typically over 10,000 pages. If Google is wasting crawl budget on low-value pages, it may miss important new content. Here is how to optimise.

What Is Crawl Budget?

Crawl budget is the number of URLs Googlebot crawls and indexes on your site within a given timeframe. It is influenced by your crawl rate limit (server speed and stability) and crawl demand (PageRank and how often pages change).

Identifying Budget Wasters

Common crawl budget wasters: parameterised URLs (session IDs, filters, sort parameters), paginated pages beyond page 5, low-quality thin content pages, and redirect chains. SeoCute Site Audit identifies all of these.

Solutions

Use robots.txt to disallow crawling of parameterised URLs. Add noindex to low-value paginated pages. Implement canonical tags on near-duplicate pages. Ensure your sitemap contains only canonical, indexable URLs.