How do internal links affect crawl budget on large sites?
How do internal links affect crawl budget on large sites?
We have a 50,000-page e-commerce site. I've read that crawl budget is a concern at this scale. How does internal linking affect how often Googlebot visits our pages?
Re: How do internal links affect crawl budget on large sites?
Pages with more inbound internal links get crawled more frequently — Googlebot follows links and naturally visits highly-linked pages more often. For large e-commerce sites, make sure your newest/highest-priority products are accessible from frequently-crawled hub pages, not buried in pagination.
Re: How do internal links affect crawl budget on large sites?
Also: every redirect in your internal link graph costs crawl budget. Use LinkJuice to find 3xx status internal links and fix them to point to final URLs. This alone can recover significant crawl capacity on large sites.
Re: How do internal links affect crawl budget on large sites?
Has anyone tried combining the LinkJuice export with a PageSpeed Insights run? We added CWV scores as a third column to the export and now we prioritise pages that have both poor internal linking AND poor Core Web Vitals — those are the ones crawlers struggle with most.
Re: How do internal links affect crawl budget on large sites?
We do quarterly internal link audits now. The before/after comparison feature is genuinely useful — I can show my client a concrete 'your PageRank went from 0.4 to 1.1' for the target page after our linking sprint. Much easier to justify the work than just showing ranking screenshots.