Definition
Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine will fetch from a site in a given period, set by how much load the server can absorb and how much demand the engine has for the site’s content. It becomes a practical constraint mainly on large sites.
Most sites never hit the limit. Google’s own guidance is that sites under a few thousand URLs generally do not need to think about it.
Where it does bite, the cause is usually self-inflicted: faceted navigation generating near-infinite parameter combinations, session IDs in URLs, or paginated archives with no crawl ceiling.
The usual error
Where this goes wrong in practice
Blocking crawl of pages in robots.txt to "save budget" when those pages carry canonical or noindex signals. A blocked URL cannot be read, so the signal never gets seen.
Related terms
Canonical URL
A canonical URL is the address a site nominates as the authoritative version of a page when several URLs serve equivalent content. It is declared with a rel="canonical" link element, and it is a strong hint to search engines rather than a directive they are obliged to follow.
DefinitionSearch engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is the practice of making a site easier for search engines to crawl, index, understand and rank, so that pages appear for queries the business can actually serve. It covers technical access, information architecture, content quality, internal linking, authority signals and the measurement that tells you which of those moved.
DefinitionBreadcrumbList schema
BreadcrumbList markup describes a page’s position in the site hierarchy as an ordered list. Google uses it to replace the raw URL in a result with a readable trail, which is one of the few rich results that still reliably renders.
DefinitionE-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness — the framework Google’s human quality raters use to assess page and site quality. Google states it is not itself a ranking factor; it describes what the systems are being tuned to approximate, and it matters most on topics that affect money or wellbeing.
DefinitionFAQ schema
FAQ schema (schema.org FAQPage) marks up question-and-answer content so machines can read the pairs. It is still a valid schema type, but Google discontinued the FAQ rich result for nearly all sites starting in May 2026, with phased removal from Search Console tooling through that August.
DefinitionFeatured snippet
A featured snippet is a short extract Google promotes above the standard results to answer a query directly, drawn from a page already ranking for it. Formats include a paragraph, an ordered or unordered list, and a table, and the format Google chooses follows the shape of the query.
DefinitionGoogle Business Profile (GBP)
Google Business Profile is the free listing that makes a business eligible for the map pack and the knowledge panel in local results. It requires verification, and it requires either a physical address customers can visit or a declared service area for businesses that travel to customers.
Definitionhreflang
hreflang is an annotation that tells search engines which language and regional variant a page is intended for, so the right version is served to the right audience. Annotations must be reciprocal — every page in a set references every other, including itself.
Definition