Large Site Owner’s Guide to Managing Your Crawl Budget

Managing a large site is not just about publishing content and updating pages it’s also about making sure search engines can find and index the right pages at the right time. When a site has thousands (or even millions) of URLs, search engines don’t crawl everything equally. Some pages may get discovered quickly, while others may be ignored for weeks. This is where crawl budget comes into play. By understanding and managing your crawl budget, you can guide search engines to focus on your most valuable pages, save resources, and ensure that your content shows up in search results when it matters most.

What is Crawl Budget?

Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine’s bots will crawl on your site during a given period. For a small website, crawl budget usually isn’t a problem. But for large websites with thousands or even millions of URLs, crawl budget management becomes critical.

If a search engine wastes time crawling low-priority pages, your important pages may be ignored or crawled too late. This can lead to a long-term problem where a search engine doesn’t discover your most important content, which can hurt your rankings.

Why Crawl Budget Matters for Large Sites

Good crawl budget management helps:

• Index priority pages faster: This is a crucial step for a large website, like an e-commerce store with thousands of products.
• Save server resources: By avoiding endless crawling of duplicate URLs, you can save your server resources.
• Improve SEO signals: By ensuring a search engine focuses on the most valuable content, you can improve your rankings.

Key Factors Affecting Crawl Budget

A few key factors can affect your website’s crawl budget.

• Site Size: The more URLs you have, the more potential for crawl waste.
• Crawl Health: A slow server response or a lot of errors can reduce crawl efficiency.
• Duplicate Content: Faceted navigation, filters, and similar pages can waste crawl budget.
• Internal Linking: Strong linking signals help a search engine identify your priority pages.
• Robots.txt Rules: A correct setup saves budget by blocking unimportant pages.
• Redirect Chains: Too many 301 or 302 redirects can harm crawl efficiency.

Strategies to Manage Crawl Budget for Large Sites

1. Optimize Your robots.txt File

You can block a search engine from crawling low-priority pages by adding a disallow rule to your robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /*?sort=

2. Handle Faceted Navigation Smartly

Don’t let a search engine crawl every filter combination. You can use:

• Robots.txt for blocking low-value facets.
• Canonical tags to consolidate duplicates.
• Noindex for unimportant filter pages.

3. Submit XML Sitemaps

To keep a search engine focused on your priority URLs, you should submit a sitemap.

• Video Sitemaps: For video-heavy sites.
• Image Sitemaps: For image-heavy sites.
• Standard XML sitemaps: For core pages.

4. Fix Crawl Errors

You should regularly check your search console for crawl errors. You should:

• Fix broken links (404s).
• Reduce redirect chains.
• Ensure important pages return 200 status codes. Our platform, Clickrank, can help you with this. The automated features on the platform can scan your website for these issues and give you a clear, prioritized list of what to fix.

5. Improve Site Speed and Server Performance

A search engine’s bots crawl more efficiently on a fast, reliable server. You can:

• Use a CDN for static files.
• Optimize images and scripts.
• Monitor server response times.

6. Strengthen Internal Linking

You can help a search engine’s bots discover priority pages faster. You should:

• Link from high-authority pages.
• Keep navigation clean and consistent.
• Avoid orphaned pages.

7. Use “Request Indexing” Wisely

For critical updates, you should use the URL Inspection tool in your search console to request recrawling.

Best Practices for Large Site Owners

• Focus crawl budget on pages that matter for business (products, categories, news, etc.).

• Regularly audit your site for duplicate or thin content.

• Keep your sitemaps clean and updated.

• Continuously monitor crawl stats in Search Console.