SEO
Crawl Budget
Quick definition
Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine bot will crawl on your site within a given period, based on crawl rate limit and crawl demand.
For most small to mid-sized sites, crawl budget isn't a major concern. It becomes critical on sites with millions of URLs, dynamic parameters, or rapid content turnover.
Why Crawl Budget matters
Wasted crawl budget — on duplicate URLs, parameter variants, redirect chains, and infinite calendars — delays indexing of important pages.
How Crawl Budget works in practice
Optimize crawl budget by fixing redirect chains, blocking low-value URLs in robots.txt, consolidating duplicates with canonical tags, and improving site speed.
Best practices
- Block low-value URLs in robots.txt.
- Fix redirect chains and broken internal links.
- Consolidate duplicates with canonicals.
- Improve server response times.
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Related terms
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a plain-text file in your site's root that tells search engine crawlers which URLs they may or may not crawl.
XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a structured file listing the URLs you want search engines to crawl and index, with metadata like last-modified dates and priority.
Indexing
Indexing is the process by which search engines add discovered pages to their searchable index, making them eligible to rank for queries.
Redirect Chain
A redirect chain is when one URL redirects to another, which redirects to another — creating multiple hops between the original request and the final destination.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the practice of optimizing a website's infrastructure — crawling, indexing, performance, and architecture — to improve search visibility.