Technical SEO
Crawl Budget Optimisation For Large Sites
Ensure search engines spend their limited crawl allowance on pages that matter.
Crawl budget only becomes a real constraint at scale, but when it does it caps everything else you try. Sites with hundreds of thousands of URLs routinely find that most crawl requests land on pages that will never rank and were never meant to exist.
You probably need this if
- The site has more than roughly a hundred thousand indexable URLs
- New or updated pages take weeks to be recrawled
- Logs show heavy crawling of parameters and filters
- Redirect chains are common across the site
What you get
- Crawl trap identification, including calendars, filters and infinite pagination
- Redirect chain audit and flattening
- Internal link architecture that shortens the path to important pages
- Faceted navigation crawl rules
- Sitemap and lastmod hygiene so recrawl priority is honest
How we approach it
-
Quantify current allocation
Use logs to establish how much crawl goes to valuable pages versus waste, expressed as a share of total requests.
-
Close the traps
Find and block the URL patterns that generate effectively infinite crawlable space.
-
Shorten the paths
Restructure internal linking so important pages sit within a few clicks of the homepage rather than buried.
-
Signal freshness honestly
Keep sitemap lastmod accurate, because inflating it across every URL destroys its usefulness as a recrawl signal.
Crawl Budget Optimisation: common questions
Does crawl budget matter for small sites?
Rarely. Below roughly ten thousand URLs Google will generally crawl everything it considers worthwhile without difficulty. If a small site has indexing problems the cause is almost always quality or internal linking rather than crawl budget.
What is a crawl trap?
A URL pattern that generates effectively unlimited crawlable pages. Common examples are date-based calendar navigation, faceted filters that combine freely, and pagination without an end. They can consume the majority of crawl budget on an otherwise healthy site.
Do redirects waste crawl budget?
Yes. Each hop is a separate request, so long chains multiply the cost of reaching a single page. Flattening chains so every redirect points directly at the final destination is one of the cheapest crawl efficiency wins available.
Related services
Find out what is actually holding you back
A short conversation and a look at your site is usually enough to tell you where the real problem is. No obligation, and no pressure to sign anything.