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What crawl budget really means for your site
Most sites don't need to obsess over crawl budget. If you're running a 200-page marketing site, Google will crawl everything just fine. The problem starts when you hit tens of thousands of pages with duplicate content, faceted navigation, or internal search result pages.
Crawl budget issues show up as indexing delays, not rankings drops. You publish something new and it takes weeks to appear in search. That lag often means Google is wasting time on low-value URLs instead of your actual content.
The fix involves blocking parameter-based URLs in robots.txt, consolidating near-duplicate pages, and improving internal linking so your best content gets discovered first. Priority isn't determined by what you think matters, it's determined by how many internal links point to a page.