They used the Removals tool to "fix crawl budget." It came back in 6 months.

They used the Removals tool to "fix crawl budget." It came back in 6 months.

Good case in confusing tools. A team wanted 30,000 junk URLs gone, so they fired the Search Console Removals tool at them, expecting permanent crawl relief.

The Removals tool only hides URLs from search results for ~6 months. It does not stop crawling, does not deindex, does not touch crawl budget. Google said so in the tool's own docs.

Six months later: every URL reappeared, still crawled, still in the index. Zero crawl saved the entire time.

The actual fix was 410-ing the junk and removing internal links — which they then did, and crawl on those paths finally fell.

No, the Removals tool is a cosmetic emergency button, not a crawl or index control.

Know what each tool actually does. Most do less than the name implies.