They deleted 22K tag pages. Crawl on real content rose 38%.
The advice is always "add more content." A WordPress news site did the opposite. 22,000 auto-generated tag and author archive pages, most with one or two posts, were 410'd and removed from the sitemap.
Why it worked: crawl demand is finite per host. Googlebot was spending roughly a third of its visits re-fetching near-empty archives that ranked for nothing.
Log analysis after: total bot requests stayed flat, but hits on the article pages climbed 38% in six weeks. Fresh articles got discovered in hours instead of days.
No, you don't have a crawl-budget problem because Google is stingy. You have one because you made 22,000 pages nobody asked for.
Prune before you beg for more crawl.
Budget Myths
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They deleted 22K tag pages. Crawl on real content rose 38%.
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