If you’re managing a large website and struggling with the challenges of getting important pages picked up by search engines, you’re not alone. The good news is that by understanding and effectively managing your crawl budget, you can increase the chances of the most important pages on your site being crawled, indexed and ranked.
In this article, we’ll explore what crawl budget is, why it matters and provide you with actionable tips on how to manage crawl budget for large websites.
What Is A Crawl Budget?
Crawl budget refers to the number of pages that search engines, such as Google, are willing and able to crawl and index on your website within a specific timeframe. Think of it as a resource allowance: search engines allocate a certain amount of time and effort to crawling your site based on a variety of factors. How efficiently you manage this allowance can directly impact your site’s ability to have key pages discovered and ranked.
Crawl budget is influenced by two main components:
Crawl Limit: This is the maximum number of pages a search engine is willing to crawl on your site without overloading your server. If your website responds slowly or regularly experiences server errors, the crawl limit will be reduced to avoid causing further issues. A fast, healthy website encourages search engines to crawl more pages.
Crawl Demand: This reflects how much interest search engines have in crawling your site’s pages. Pages that are new, frequently updated, or receiving a lot of traffic generally have higher crawl demand. Conversely, outdated, duplicate, or low-value pages may not attract much interest, leading to them being crawled less frequently or not at all.
It’s important to understand that not all pages are treated equally. Search engines prioritise crawling pages they believe are valuable and relevant to users. If your site has tens of thousands or even millions of URLs, and many of them are low-value or similar in content, you could be wasting precious crawl budget on pages that won’t help your site perform better in search results.
Efficiently managing your crawl budget means making it as easy as possible for search engines to discover, crawl and index your most important pages, without getting bogged down in less useful areas of your site.
Why Crawl Budget Matters
For small websites with a limited number of pages, crawl budget rarely causes issues; search engines can easily access and index the full site without constraints. But as websites grow larger, crawl budget becomes a much more important factor in maintaining strong search visibility.
When search engines use their allocated crawl resources on low-priority or less valuable pages, there’s a real risk that your most important pages, such as high-converting product listings, lead generation pages, or cornerstone content, may not be crawled frequently enough, or even at all. This can delay new content being indexed, prevent critical updates from appearing in search results, and restrict the overall growth of your organic traffic.
Poor crawl management can also cause other issues, including:
Delayed content updates: Even if you improve a page, it won’t benefit you in search until it’s re-crawled and re-indexed.
Missed opportunities for ranking: If important new pages aren’t crawled quickly, they can’t start building visibility and authority.
Wasted technical resources: Search engines spending time on low-value pages can drag down the efficiency of your whole website from an SEO perspective.
By guiding search engines toward the areas of your site that matter most, you ensure that your key pages are consistently discovered, refreshed, and ranked. Managing your crawl budget well is about making sure search engines are investing their effort where it will bring you the best return, ultimately supporting better rankings, a stronger user experience, and higher conversions.
Tips To Handle Crawl Budget Efficiently
Now that you know the impact and importance of crawl budget, let’s take you through some tips to manage crawl budget efficiently for large websites.
Prioritise High-Value Pages
When it comes to web pages, not all content is created equally. For example, you’d benefit more from search engines crawling and indexing pages with high traffic potential, revenue-generating products or critical information as opposed to pages that get very little traffic.
To give your high-value pages the best chance of being crawled and indexed by search engines, you should ensure that these pages are easily accessible and linked prominently within your site. If you’d like help with your internal linking strategy, get in touch with our team today.
Use Your Sitemap & Robots.txt Strategically
XML sitemap: A well-structured XML sitemap helps search engines find your important pages quickly. Make sure your sitemap is up-to-date and includes only the pages you want to be indexed.
Robots.txt: Use the robots.txt file to block crawlers from accessing low-priority pages, such as admin areas, duplicate content or pages that are irrelevant for search engines. This frees up the crawl budget for more important areas of your site.
Manage Duplicate Content
As we’ve previously mentioned, similar pages with duplicate content can waste crawl budget. To avoid duplicate content being crawled, consider implementing canonical tags to signal the preferred version of a page when there are duplicates. This strategy is quite common amongst eCommerce sites.
For example, as a user, you might come across a wheelbarrow sub-category under the gardening, farming and construction categories. Although this makes sense for a user navigating the site, search engines will crawl each of these pages as individual pages, even though they contain the same content. By adding canonical tags to the URL that performs the best, you are telling search engines that it is the wheelbarrow sub-category that you want it to crawl and show to users, whilst still having the other wheelbarrow sub-categories available in the navigation.
Optimise Page Load Times
Search engines have a set amount of time to crawl your site. Therefore, if you have a slow website, you could be seriously reducing how many pages can be crawled.
Using techniques like optimising images, reducing server response time and using caching techniques are just some of the ways to improve your site’s loading speed. Get in touch with our team to learn more about how to speed up your site speed.
Regularly Update Your Content
Keeping your website content up to date isn’t just good for your users; it also encourages search engines to crawl your pages more frequently. Fresh, valuable content signals to search engines that your site is active, relevant and worth revisiting, which can lead to faster indexing of updates and a stronger presence in search results.
For large websites, regular updates can help prioritise the crawling of key pages, ensuring that your most important content doesn’t become stale or overlooked. Updating existing pages with new information, improving product descriptions, refreshing blog articles, or expanding FAQs are all practical ways to maintain content relevance.
However, updates must be meaningful. Simply making small, superficial changes is unlikely to trigger more frequent crawling or improve your search performance. Focus on updates that genuinely enhance the quality, accuracy, or usefulness of the page for your audience.
Regular content updates, combined with other crawl budget management strategies, can play a key role in keeping your site fresh in the eyes of search engines and ahead of competitors who let their content go stale.
Implement Pagination Tags
Large websites, especially eCommerce stores, often use pagination to organise large sets of products, articles or other content across multiple pages. If pagination isn’t handled correctly, search engines can struggle to understand how these pages are connected, potentially wasting crawl budget or missing key content altogether.
By using rel=”next” and rel=”prev” pagination tags, you signal to search engines that a series of pages are part of a sequence. This helps search engines crawl paginated content more efficiently, without treating each page as a separate, unrelated entity. It also prevents crawlers from getting stuck in endless loops of “next” links, which can quickly drain your crawl budget.
Even though Google has stated that it no longer uses these tags as strong signals, they still help maintain clean site architecture and can assist other search engines in understanding page relationships. Combined with clear internal linking and well-structured category pages, good pagination practices support better crawl efficiency and a stronger overall site experience.
Implement Noindex Tags
Not every page on your website needs to appear in search engine results. Pages like ad landing pages, login screens, thin or low-quality content, and archive pages often don’t offer much standalone value to search users. Allowing search engines to crawl and index these types of pages can waste valuable crawl budget and dilute the overall quality of your site in search rankings.
By applying a noindex tag to these pages, you signal to search engines that they should be excluded from indexing. This keeps search engines focused on crawling and indexing the pages that matter most to your SEO performance, such as key product categories, high-converting landing pages, and informative blog content.
It’s important to remember that noindex does not necessarily block crawlers from accessing a page (for that, you’d use robots.txt), but it does prevent the page from appearing in the search results. Used carefully, noindex tags are an effective way to streamline your site’s presence in search engines and preserve crawl budget for the pages that drive real value.
Ready to take your eCommerce marketing to the next level?
Crawl budget management is crucial for large websites to ensure that the most important pages are crawled, indexed and ranked by search engines. By following our tips and best practices, we can help you maintain a healthy crawl budget, leading to better search engine visibility and improved organic traffic.
If you’d like to learn more about how to manage crawl budget for large websites, drop us a line. Our team of specialists will analyse your website to ensure that your priority pages are being crawled and indexed, helping you get the most out of your marketing performance.
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Lucie Ogé
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