Crawl budget for small teams

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Most advice about crawl budget assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What to keep

Large sites can waste crawling on pages nobody should see. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

What good looks like

Clean internal linking is most of the fix. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What this looks like day to day

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about crawl budget before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Faceted navigation generates infinite URLs if unchecked — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.