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Technical

Crawl budget

Crawl budget is the set of URLs on your site that Google can and wants to crawl, limited on one side by what your server can handle and on the other by how much Google wants your pages. Google says the concept matters for sites with a million or more pages, or ten thousand or more that change daily. A small business site does not have a crawl budget problem. It may have a crawl demand problem, which is different.

The two halves

Crawl capacity is the ceiling: how many connections Google will hold open to your server without slowing it down for visitors. Crawl demand is the appetite: how much Google wants to fetch, driven by how popular your URLs are, how often they change, and how worthwhile past crawls turned out to be. Budget is where the two meet.

Who Google says should care

Large sites with more than a million unique pages that change weekly, medium sites with more than ten thousand pages that change daily, and sites with many URLs stuck in discovered, currently not indexed. Google adds that if your pages are crawled the same day they are published, you do not need to read the guide at all.

What a small site actually has

A demand question. When sixty pages are not being crawled, it is not because Google ran out of capacity for them. It is because nothing has told Google those pages matter: no links from crawled pages, no links from other sites, and a site history that has not yet earned much attention. The fix is the same as for the discovered status: link to the pages, earn links to the site, remove the pages that dilute it.

Housekeeping that helps at any size

Keep the server fast, because a slow response lowers the capacity half. Do not generate endless parameter and filter URLs. Return proper not-found codes for pages that are gone rather than soft redirects to the homepage. Keep redirect chains short. None of that is crawl budget optimisation on a small site. It is just not wasting the attention you have.

Where this shows up in the tracker

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