Blocking image CDN in robots.txt tanked Image Search by 60%.
Someone read "reduce crawl waste" and blocked their entire image CDN subdomain in robots.txt to "save budget for HTML." Cautionary case study.
Googlebot stopped fetching images. Within six weeks, Image Search traffic — which was 18% of total — fell 60%. And the saved "budget" went nowhere useful, because images and HTML aren't crawled from one shared pool you can redirect.
They reverted the block, and image traffic recovered over the following two months.
The myth underneath: that crawl budget is one fungible bucket you reallocate by starving one type. It isn't. Blocking images doesn't make HTML crawl faster.
No, you can't rob Peter to pay Paul here.
Crawl "savings" that cost you indexed assets aren't savings.
Budget Myths
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Blocking image CDN in robots.txt tanked Image Search by 60%.
Этот пост опубликован в Telegram-канале Budget Myths. Подписаться можно по ссылке: @CrawlBudgetMyths.