What is crawl budget?

Crawl budget is the number of pages Google will crawl on your site within a given timeframe. For small sites (under 10,000 pages), crawl budget is not a concern — Google crawls everything. For large sites (10,000+ pages), crawl budget optimization ensures Google discovers and indexes your important pages. Factors affecting crawl budget: site speed (faster sites get crawled more), server errors (500 errors reduce crawling), duplicate content (wastes crawl on duplicate pages), redirect chains (each redirect consumes a crawl), and URL parameters (generate infinite URL variations). Optimization strategies: 1) Block unimportant URLs in robots.txt (admin pages, search results, filtered views). 2) Fix server errors and broken links. 3) Eliminate duplicate content with canonical tags. 4) Flatten redirect chains (maximum 1 redirect). 5) Use XML sitemap to prioritize important URLs. 6) Internal link to important pages (pages with more internal links get crawled more often). 7) Update content regularly — Google crawls frequently-updated pages more often. Monitor crawl stats in Google Search Console (Settings → Crawl Stats). Watch for drops in crawl rate and increases in "crawled but not indexed" pages.