How To Stop Filter Results From Eating Up Your Crawl Budget? Ask An SEO

The crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot crawls and indexes in a period of time on your website. You may have thousands of pages that are worth crawling, but Googlebot does not crawl all of them in a single given period because of crawl budget. The crawl budget differs from one website to another based on many parameters like size, authority and speed of the website.

However, filter in result can be one of the most annoying things to have when talking about efficient crawl budget usage. Filter results produced by facet navigation can end up gulping down vital crawl resources if not well controlled. How do you stop such filter results from gobbling away your crawl budget? Let's explore some effective SEO strategies for crawl budget optimization.

What Is A Crawl Budget And Why Is It Important?

Crawling budget management guarantees that Googlebot and any other search engine crawler is actually spending his time and resources crawling your most valuable pages for the site. A large site, an e-commerce platform, or any site for that matter, with dynamic content can often suffer from inefficiencies in its crawl activity if Googlebot becomes bogged down on otherwise unnecessary pages, such as filter results. Thus, optimizing your crawl budget will make it possible for your most relevant content to get crawled, indexed, and ranked more rapidly. This way, you improve your overall SEO performance. To learn more about crawl budgets, you can also refer to Wikipedia's page on Crawling and Indexing.

How Filter Results Affect Crawl Budget

Filter results. These are the pages created when the user narrows down content with filters: price and color filters to select products, for instance. Although helpful for UX, they produce thousands of URLs with very minimal unique content, causing Googlebot to waste time crawling them. This diminishes the chances that higher-priority pages are crawled and indexed. How do you prevent filter results from wasting your crawl budget? Here's how:

1. Use Robots.txt to Block Crawling of Filtered Pages

A straightforward and quick fix is to instruct the crawlers of search engines not to crawl them. You can set the robots.txt file such that a crawler doesn't crawl specific URL parameters that are created by your filters. To illustrate, you have something like the following excluded from crawlers the Googlebot for URLs that include filters:

Disallow: /*?filter=

This tells Googlebot not to crawl any URLs containing filter parameters.

Learn more about robots.txt and other configurations on robots.txt configuration experts.

2. Canonical Tags for Duplicate Content Management

One tool to employ for SEO crawl budget optimization is canonical tags. Applying canonical tags means that filter results will in turn create multiple URLs with content either the same or even similar. Applying canonical tags however will communicate this to the search engines that these are duplicates, thereby informing them that the canonical tag points to the original content where you get indexing the correct page from Google while the duplicates are ignored.

Use canonical tags properly so that you don't allow filter results to weaken your SEO efforts.

3. Use Noindex Meta Tags

If it's impossible to be blocked from crawling completely, you can, at least, prevent them from being indexed. Adding noindex meta tags to the filter pages will avoid their indexation in the search engine. It is pretty important for proper crawl budget management because whatever be the crawling of Googlebot on these pages they don't litter your search index.

This strategy is typically in the context of a comprehensive technical SEO audit to ensure only your important pages get indexed. To know more about technical SEO services like Technical SEO Audit and Monitoring Experts, click here.

4. Optimize Internal Linking Structure

The internal linking strategy of your site can be highly important in the way that crawlers navigate through your site. Allowing fewer internal links to filter result pages and linking only high-priority pages will help your site direct Googlebot toward the best content. This will allow better crawling efficiency and makes the most use of the crawl budget.

For example, with the services like Site Architecture Optimization, you could end up having an organized internal linking that will always affect your crawling efficiency.

5. XML Sitemaps for Priority Pages

Such an updated and accurate XML sitemap will heighten the prioritization of the right pages by search engines to crawl. Filter out result pages from your XML sitemap so Googlebot can be specifically led to the relevant content, thus enhancing crawl efficiency. That way, important landing pages, product pages, and valuable blog posts will be crawled and indexed sooner.

You can find more on XML Sitemap Optimization, to ensure that your sitemap is correctly set up.

6. Monitor and Adjust Often

Optimization of crawl budget is not a one-time adjustment; on the contrary, it is a process that continues to be done. Monitoring crawl data is critical, and it should be done regularly through tools like Google Search Console. It's thereby possible to amend the settings whenever necessary based on how Googlebot is interacting with your site in order to ensure that it focuses on those valuable pages.

Regular SEO audits will be keeping you on track of potential crawl inefficiencies. Here is the overview of SEO Audit Services that can keep your site in check.

Final Thoughts on Optimizing Crawl Budget

Proper control of crawl budget is very important to maximize the value of SEO that your website can enjoy. You can now avoid filter results from wasting resources by forcing Googlebot to spend time on pages that matter most for rankings.

It's about optimizing your robots.txt, using canonical tags, or simply keeping that XML sitemap up-to-date—all those small tweaks help prevent filter results from eating into your crawl budget.

To delve a bit deeper into more strategies to help optimize your website for search engines, go to CodingClave Technologies and browse their services, such as Community Analytics Reporting, Local SEO Reporting and Analytics, and Page Speed Optimization.

Make your crawl budget work for you, not against you, by implementing smart SEO strategies.