What's your workflow for identifying crawl budget waste on large site?

When am working on large site, crawl budget becomes key concern. And what the workflow for identifying crawl budget waste? Which tool or method that given you most reliable insights?

I usually start with Google Search Console to see which pages are being crawled and indexed. Then I run a full site crawl to find duplicate pages, redirect chains, broken links, parameter URLs, and low value pages that should not be taking up crawl resources.

How large is large, though? Google's own crawl budget guide puts it at around a million pages, or ten thousand plus if the content changes daily. Below that it usually is not the bottleneck, and that is worth ruling out before you spend a week on it.

If you are genuinely in that range, both answers above will surface duplicates, but I would open the Crawl Stats report first and look at the breakdown by response code and by file type. A large share of requests coming back 404 or 301, or a lot of them going to JS and CSS, tells you something a site crawl cannot, because a crawler shows you what exists and the logs show you where Googlebot actually chose to spend the requests.

The one that gets missed most is soft 404s. Google calls them out specifically because they keep getting crawled, and they do not show up as errors in a normal crawl.

Server logs are still my starting point because they show what bots actually spend time on. After that I compare crawl data with index coverage and internal linking to uncover pages that consume budget without adding value.

I usually start with Google Search Console and server logs to see where Googlebot is spending its crawl budget. Then I look for duplicate URLs, parameter pages, orphan pages, and low-value content that can be consolidated or blocked from crawling.

i mostly start with server logs. they show where googlebot spends most of its time.

Anos_King said:

When am working on large site, crawl budget becomes key concern. And what the workflow for identifying crawl budget waste? Which tool or method that given you most reliable insights?

Click to expand...

for larger websites, I typically take an approach of analyzing log files in conjunction with google search console crawl information. It is most efficient to gain from recognizing the wasted resource caused by URL patterns.

In larger scale websites, I typically begin with the server logs since they provide an indication of which URLs Googlebot is actually crawling. This is then supplemented by data from the Google Search Console crawl statistics and Screaming Frog/Sitebulb to determine wasteful URLs, duplication, filters, and poor quality pages.

For big sites, I always use a combination of server log analysis and GSC crawl data. Logs indicate what Googlebot is really busy with, whereas things like Screaming Frog can discover duplicate URLs, bad parameters, and indexing problems.

Analyze a blog like from Seth Godin and think deep about it why this blog is so successfull? It's not DA , DA a scam invented from MOZ not from google , big G not uses DA. It's the3 architecture. The arcitecture best for seo is more worse, when you have mishmash content on it like "have all on one site".