Technical SEO FAQ · Crawling, Crawl Budget & URL Management
How do you determine whether a website actually has a crawl-budget problem?
Do not infer a crawl-budget problem from URL count alone.
Google's current crawl-budget guidance is primarily aimed at very large or rapidly changing sites, including roughly 1 million+ unique pages with moderate change, 10,000+ pages changing very rapidly, or sites with a large share of URLs reported as "Discovered - currently not indexed." These are rough guidance thresholds, not hard limits.
Investigate:
- Crawl Stats in Search Console.
- Server logs.
- URL inventory.
- Crawl distribution by URL type.
- Important URLs that remain undiscovered or stale.
- Server response capacity.
- Duplicate and parameter URL volume.
The strongest evidence is not "Googlebot crawled 500,000 URLs." It is evidence that crawling is inefficient or constrained in a way that affects important URLs.
Related questions
- Can blocking a URL in robots.txt solve an indexation problem?
- How do you analyze Googlebot crawl behavior beyond Search Console?
- How do you decide which URL patterns should be crawlable?
- How do you differentiate crawl demand from crawl capacity?
- How do you identify URLs that unnecessarily consume crawler resources?
- How would you handle millions of faceted-navigation URLs?
- How would you optimize crawling on a website with millions of URLs?
- What patterns in server logs indicate inefficient crawling?
- When would you use robots.txt versus noindex?
