Crawling
How search engines discover pages by following links across the web.
1 min readLast updated Apr 2026
Quick Reference
CategorySEO for Ecommerce
Related Terms2
How search engines discover pages by following links across the web.
Why It Matters
If Google can't crawl your pages, they can't rank. Crawl budget is limited—large sites especially need to ensure important pages are discoverable while unimportant pages don't waste crawl resources. Poor crawlability is a silent SEO killer.
Practical Example
Scenario
An ecommerce site with 50,000 product pages analyzes their crawl stats in Google Search Console.
Calculation
Crawl budget: 10,000 pages/day. Wasted on: filter pages (3,000), out-of-stock (2,000), pagination (2,500). Only 2,500/day on actual products.Result
By blocking filter URLs and consolidating pagination, they redirect crawl budget to products—improving average crawl frequency from weekly to daily on key pages.
Pro Tips
- 1Submit an XML sitemap with only indexable, important pages
- 2Use internal linking strategically—pages with more links get crawled more
- 3Block unimportant pages (filters, sorts, admin) in robots.txt to save crawl budget
- 4Monitor Google Search Console 'Crawl Stats' regularly for issues
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Creating infinite URL variations via filters, parameters, and sorts
Burying important pages deep in site architecture (4+ clicks from homepage)
Blocking pages you actually want indexed via robots.txt or noindex