Tutorial v1.0, updated 2026-07-07

Cut your crawl waste

Stop crawlers spending their budget on junk so more of your real pages get crawled and indexed.

The outcome: more of your good pages get crawled and indexed, because crawlers stop wasting their budget on redirects, errors, duplicates and pages you told them not to index. See crawl budget.

  1. Measure the waste first. Run the Audit, or build your twin, to crawl the site and read the crawl efficiency: the share of fetched URLs that can actually be indexed. A low number is budget spent for nothing.
  2. Fix the redirects. Point internal links at the final URL so nothing has to hop, and collapse any redirect chains down to a single step. Every redirect a crawler follows is a fetch it did not spend on a real page.
  3. Clear the errors. Find and fix or remove internal links into 404s and 5xxs, so crawlers stop chasing dead ends on your behalf.
  4. Resolve the duplicates. Set a clean canonical on near duplicate pages, and strip tracking parameters that turn one page into many addresses, so a crawler is not indexing the same thing ten times.
  5. Get noindex out of the crawl path. A page set to noindex still costs a fetch to discover, so do not link to it from pages you want crawled, and check robots.txt against your sitemap with the robots.txt tester for URLs that are listed and blocked at once.
  6. Re-crawl and confirm the efficiency rose and the issue counts fell. For the granular fix list behind these steps, see trim crawl waste.

You cannot make a crawler visit more, but you can make every visit count. Removing the waste is how your best pages get the attention instead of the leftovers.

Read next

What crawl efficiency is

The share of the URLs a crawler fetched on your site that can actually be indexed, and why the rest is wasted budget.

What a redirect chain is

One URL that bounces through several before it resolves, and the cost.

What a canonical URL is

The one address you want engines to treat as the real version of a page.

All topics
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