Crawl budget sounds like enterprise SEO jargon, but it hit me hard when a client's new blog posts weren't appearing in Google for weeks.

Google allocates a specific number of pages it'll crawl on your site per day. Waste that budget on garbage pages and your important content gets ignored.

What burns crawl budget: Infinite scroll pagination creates thousands of URL parameters. Faceted navigation on e-commerce sites generates duplicate pages. Old PDFs nobody reads. Broken redirect chains that lead nowhere.

I ran a crawl on a client site with 400 pages. Screaming Frog found 2,847 URLs when you included all the filter combinations and session IDs. Google was crawling trash instead of the twenty product pages that actually mattered.

The fix involved robots.txt blocking parameter URLs, canonicalizing filter pages, and removing 600+ obsolete blog posts. Within three weeks, new content started indexing within 48 hours instead of three weeks.

For sites under 500 pages, crawl budget rarely matters. Above that, especially with faceted navigation or user-generated content, it becomes the difference between getting indexed and getting ignored.