WordPress tags ate your crawl budget

WordPress tags ate your crawl budget
News site, 4,000 articles, 11,000 tag archive pages — most with ONE post. Google spent its crawl on /tag/random-word instead of fresh articles. New posts took 9 days to index.

The cleanup:
— noindexed every tag archive
— removed tag links from article footers
— kept maybe 40 real hub-tags, gave THOSE proper curated intros and indexed them

Auto-generated tag pages are thin near-duplicates of category pages. One-post tags are pure crawl waste.

Caveat: don't bulk-delete the tags — that 404s the URLs. Noindex first, let them drop, then prune.