Too many meaningless URLs spending up web crawl budget

Optimizing Crawl Budget: Strategies to Manage Unnecessary URLs and Improve Indexing Efficiency

In the digital age, ensuring that your website’s most valuable and up-to-date pages are effectively crawled and indexed by search engines is crucial for maintaining strong visibility and user engagement. However, many website owners face the challenge of their crawl budget being consumed by low-value or outdated URLs, which can hinder the indexing of their important content.

Understanding the Challenge

Consider a website focused on booking accommodations—hotels, resorts, homestays, and more. Recently, the site owner observed that Google’s crawling activity is heavily concentrated on outdated or redundant URLs—approximately 10 million indexed pages and an additional 11 million URLs that have been crawled but not indexed. This extensive volume of low-quality URLs is detracting from the crawler’s ability to focus on the site’s primary and most relevant pages.

In response, the owner implemented several site-wide directives such as noindex, nofollow, and canonical tags on pages with multiple URL variations, particularly those generated by query parameters. While these are standard and valuable techniques, the process is slow, and immediate positive results are desired to ensure that Google can efficiently discover and index the most important content.

Proactive Approaches to Managing Crawl Budget

To address this issue and accelerate the influence on Google’s crawling and indexing behavior, consider the following strategies:

1. Manual URL Submission via Google Search Console

2. Utilize the URL Inspection Tool to request indexing for high-priority pages directly. This approach allows you to prompt Google to revisit specific URLs, especially those that have recently been updated or are of high value.

3. Keep in mind that this method is manual and best suited for a manageable number of URLs rather than large batches.

4. Leveraging the Google Indexing API

5. Use the Google Indexing API to submit batches of URLs periodically—about once or twice a week.

6. This API can expedite the process of informing Google about new or updated content, ensuring they understand which pages are most relevant for indexing.

Considerations and Best Practices

While these tools are powerful, their effectiveness depends on proper implementation:

• When submitting a URL from a listing or index page, understand whether Googlebot will crawl only that specific URL or all followable links contained within it. Generally, Google will crawl the URL you submit and follow links on that page unless those links are marked with directives like nofollow or blocked via