Crawl budget: 5 signals to watch
Crawl budget is wasted in silence. Five signals in logs and Search Console to detect it in time.
In short:
- More than 20% of crawl on non-indexable pages signals waste.
- URL parameters and facets are the first suspects.
- The crawled-to-indexed ratio can be read in Search Console.
Google does not explore a site infinitely. On large sites, crawl budget becomes a resource to defend.
The 5 warning signals
- Drop in pages crawled per day
- Massive crawl of parameterized URLs
- Missing 304 codes on stable pages
- Chained redirects in crawl paths
- Deteriorating crawled-to-indexed ratio
Read logs without drowning
A monthly analysis is enough. Segment by page type, isolate greedy templates and compare with each segment’s real SEO value.
Act on the causes
Robots.txt, canonicals and internal linking do most of the work. The rest is architecture, such as cannibalization detection.