What is Crawl Budget?

Why rankings are staying the same

You’ve published new pages, made updates, and still nothing’s moving in search. Google just isn’t picking things up fast enough. That’s frustrating, and it’s a problem I’ve seen trip up a lot of sites.

Here’s the thing, Google doesn’t crawl everything on your site every day. It has limits. And if those limits get eaten up by the wrong pages, your important content sits waiting. I’m going to walk you through how crawl budget actually works, what kills it, and what you can do about it.

What crawl budget actually means

Crawl budget is the number of URLs Google crawls on your site within a given period. Two things shape it.

The first is crawl rate limit, how fast Google can fetch your pages without stressing your server. Slow load times, timeouts, and server errors all push this lower.

The second is crawl demand, how much Google wants to crawl you. Sites that are popular, fresh, and high quality attract more crawl attention. A fast server alone won’t force Google to crawl more if demand is low.

One thing worth clearing up: there’s no fixed pages-per-day quota you can request or negotiate. And noindex doesn’t save crawl, Google still has to fetch the page to read the directive. *There is a quota if you’re manually requesting a re-crawl or re-index from Google Search Console.

Where crawl budget gets wasted

This is where most sites leak. The root problem is almost always URL inflation, too many crawlable URLs that add no real value.

A faceted navigation is a classic culprit. Filter and sort combinations on an e-commerce site can generate thousands of near-identical URLs. Add tracking parameters and session IDs into the mix and you’re looking at a massive crawl drain on pages that should never be indexed.

Beyond parameters, duplicate content is another big one. Printer-friendly pages, HTTP and HTTPS versions of the same URL, trailing slash variants, mobile and desktop duplicates. Each one is a wasted crawl.

Internal search results are another trap. They generate endless URLs, rarely have indexing value, and can expand without any limit if you let them.

Then there’s the technical side: redirect chains, broken internal links, soft 404s (pages that return a 200 status but are essentially empty), and discontinued product pages showing blank templates. Google spends crawl budget on all of it.

If your logs show bots hitting lots of these patterns while key pages get crawled infrequently, that’s your problem right there.

When this actually matters

Crawl budget is mostly a non-issue for small, stable sites. If you’ve got a few hundred pages that index quickly, don’t spend time here.

It starts to matter on large sites like e-commerce, news, marketplaces, UGC platforms. Anything with thousands of URLs. It also matters after a migration, when redirects and internal link shifts temporarily increase crawl load.

The clearest signals that you have a crawl budget problem: key pages are slow to index or refresh, Google Search Console shows large clusters of “Discovered. Currently not indexed,” or your log files show heavy bot traffic on redirects, errors, and parameter URLs.

How to fix it

Start by understanding where crawl is going. You can pull server logs over several weeks and segment by status code, directory, and URL template. Pair that with Search Console’s Crawl Stats report. To help see what percentage of crawl is hitting your priority pages versus everything else.

You could just purchase Screaming Frog and run monthly crawls and audits on your sites to find all these errors. It’s extremely recommended and worth it.

From there, the fixes are straightforward.

Clean up your internal links. Priority pages should be easy to reach without crawling through layers of redirects or low-value pages first. Link to them from high-authority pages on your site.

Reduce URL inflation. Robots.txt is useful for blocking crawl traps that have no indexing value, like internal search results (e.g. /wp-admin) and filter or sorting URL combinations. Don’t use robots.txt as a budget-shifting trick; use it to keep bots out of places they shouldn’t be.

Fix your canonicalization. Every duplicate cluster should point clearly to one preferred URL. Redirects should resolve in a single step, not chains.

Return proper status codes. Discontinued content should return 410 or 404, not 200. Soft 404s waste crawl and send mixed signals.

Keep your XML sitemap clean. Only include canonical, indexable URLs that return 200. No redirects, no errors.

Improve server performance. Consistent response times and low TTFB support higher crawl rates. Reduce 5xx errors and 429 responses.

After making changes, monitor your logs for shifts in crawl distribution by template. Watch Search Console’s Crawl Stats and coverage reports. For significant changes like robots.txt or faceting rules, roll them out in stages and set clear rollback criteria if key pages start dropping from discovery.

Crawl budget isn’t a daily concern for most sites. But if you’re running something large, you’re post-migration, or your important pages are sitting in limbo while Google crawls junk. This is worth your time to fix. The goal is simple: make sure Google spends its crawl on the pages that matter.

Frequently Asked Questions

If I have a link without the “nofollow” does that mean that now I spent 100 links in my crawl budget rather than just one since it’ll crawl that same link once on every page?

Having a “dofollow” (without the nofollow) link on 100 pages doesn’t multiply your crawl budget usage. Crawl budget is about unique URLs Googlebot visits, not how many times it stumbles across a link. If the same URL shows up as a dofollow link across every page on your site, Googlebot crawls the destination once. It’s smart enough to recognize the same URL no matter how many times it appears.

Is fixing my 3xx, and 4xx errors results in an immediate ranking boost?

It won’t have an immediate effect in SEO but over the long run it will. If you leave the 3xx and 4xx errors you have right now and keep working on SEO it will like swimming against the current. Either your SEO efforts won’t have have any effect at all or the results won’t be as good. Getting the technical side nailed before focusing on mass content production is a healthier approach.