Killed an orphan folder, recovered 14% of crawl budget

Killed an orphan folder, recovered 14% of crawl budget

Ecom blog had 1,900 tag pages. Nobody linked to them except the post footers. Logs showed Googlebot spending ~14% of total hits on /blog/tag/* — pages with one or two posts each, thin as paper.

Move:
— noindex + nofollow the tag template
— Pulled tag links out of post footers entirely
— Left a sitemap of only the 40 tags that actually had 8+ posts

Within a month crawl hits on real product and category URLs jumped. GSC "Discovered – not indexed" dropped from 4,100 to 2,600.

Caveat: if any tag page actually ranks, redirect it to the parent category before you noindex — don't just nuke traffic.