The outcome: crawlers spend their time on your real pages, not on waste. Less waste means more of your real content gets crawled, indexed, and answered from. See crawl budget.
- Run Site audit, or build your twin, to crawl the site and roll up the issues: redirects, errors, noindex pages, thin content, and near duplicates.
- Run the Log analyser on a server access log to see what bots are actually fetching, and how much of it is redirects and errors. This is what waste looks like in practice.
- Fix the big ones. Point internal links at final URLs so nothing redirects. Strip tracking parameters. Collapse redirect chains. Set a canonical on duplicates, and use the header form for non HTML ones.
- Check robots.txt against your sitemap with the Robots tester. A URL listed in the sitemap and blocked in robots is a contradiction that wastes budget.
- Re-crawl and confirm the issue counts drop.