Fixing Crawl Errors and Removing Duplicate Content to Save Crawl Budget

To fix crawl errors and remove duplicate content to save your crawl budget, you should focus on identifying and managing duplicate pages and ensuring search engines efficiently crawl your important content.

Key steps include:

• Identify duplicate content through site audits using tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, or Netpeak Spider. These tools help detect internal duplicates, redirect chains, and orphan pages that waste crawl budget.

• Fix duplicate content by:

  • Implementing 301 redirects from duplicate URLs to the preferred version to consolidate link equity and avoid crawling multiple versions.
  • Using canonical tags (rel="canonical") on duplicate or near-duplicate pages to signal the original page to search engines without removing the duplicates entirely.
  • Applying noindex meta robots tags (<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">) on pages that should be crawled but not indexed, such as filtered or paginated pages.
  • Editing the robots.txt file to block crawling of low-value or duplicate directories, but avoid blocking duplicate content entirely if you want Google to be aware of it.

• Fix crawl errors by resolving broken links, redirect chains, and orphan pages to ensure search engines can efficiently crawl your site without wasting resources on errors or dead ends.

• Regularly audit your site to monitor for new duplicates or crawl issues and maintain a healthy crawl budget, which helps search engines prioritize your most valuable pages for indexing and ranking.

By systematically addressing duplicate content and crawl errors, you prevent search engines from wasting crawl budget on redundant or problematic pages, improving your site’s indexing efficiency and SEO performance.