Google's crawler wastes most of its budget on URLs you'd never want ranked. Cut the links.

Google's crawler wastes most of its budget on URLs you'd never want ranked. Cut the links.

Unpopular opinion: your crawl budget problem is a linking problem. Bots crawl what you link.

The trim checklist:

— Pull server logs and see where Googlebot actually spends time.
— Cross-reference: are faceted filters, sort params, tag archives, and pagination eating crawls?
— These get crawled because they're internally linked everywhere.
— Strip or nofollow links to low-value parameter URLs; consolidate tag pages.
— Point freed crawl attention at money pages via stronger hub linking.

Every link to a ?sort=price URL is you telling Google "crawl this instead of my product." Stop voting for junk.

When did you last read your own access logs? That's where the truth lives.