What is Crawl Budget?

Every website has a crawl budget—the resources Google allocates to discovering and indexing your pages. For small sites (under a few thousand pages), crawl budget is rarely a concern. But for large sites with thousands or millions of pages, managing crawl budget becomes critical to ensure important pages get indexed quickly and efficiently.

Two factors determine crawl budget: Crawl rate limit - maximum crawl speed without overloading servers, and Crawl demand - how much Google wants to crawl based on popularity and freshness. Sites with fast servers and high-value content get more generous crawl budgets.

Common crawl budget wasters include: Duplicate content across multiple URLs, Soft 404 pages (empty pages returning 200 status), Infinite URL spaces (calendars, filters, sessions), Low-value pages (thin content, old press releases), Redirect chains (multiple consecutive redirects), Hacked or spam pages, and Orphan pages without internal links.

Protect crawl budget by: Blocking unimportant pages in robots.txt, Using canonical tags for duplicate content, Implementing proper redirects (avoid chains), Improving site speed and server response, Maintaining a clean URL structure, Updating XML sitemaps regularly, and Removing or consolidating low-value content.

Track crawl budget using: Google Search Console's Crawl Stats report, Server log analysis, Third-party SEO tools (Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl), and Core Web Vitals reports. Regular monitoring helps identify crawl issues before they impact indexing.