[Case Study] How we optimized our Crawl Budget by removing 72% of our indexed URLs while growing to 30M sessions/month.

Optimizing Crawl Budget and Enhancing Performance: A Comprehensive Case Study from a Large-Scale E-Commerce Platform

In the rapidly evolving landscape of e-commerce, maintaining optimal website health and visibility is crucial for sustained growth. Recently, our team embarked on a 1.5-year SEO optimization project aimed at refining crawl efficiency, reducing duplicate content, and ultimately driving significant traffic increases. We are excited to share a detailed case study outlining our strategies, tools, and results—particularly how we successfully reduced our indexed URLs by 72% while expanding our monthly sessions to 30 million.

Key Highlights of the Project

1. Dramatic Reduction in Index Size Without Compromising Visibility

One of our primary objectives was to streamline our website’s index. Through targeted interventions, we decreased our indexed URLs by approximately 18 million, trimming over three-quarters of redundant or low-value pages. Importantly, this reduction did not hinder our performance—in fact, we observed improvements in organic Click-Through Rate (CTR) and average search position, indicating more targeted and relevant search visibility.

2. Development of a Real-Time Crawl Analysis Tool

Handling a vast catalog of millions of URLs necessitated robust monitoring solutions. In response, we created a custom real-time crawl analyzer capable of efficiently processing large-scale crawl data. This tool provided immediate insights into crawl frequency, indexing issues, and potential bottlenecks, enabling prompt action and continuous optimization.

3. Implementation of an Automated SEO Alert System

To proactively manage SEO health, we developed a sophisticated alert mechanism that keeps us informed about critical index and crawl-related issues. Automated notifications help us swiftly address errors such as URL duplication, orphaned pages, or crawl inefficiencies, ensuring the website remains optimized at all times.

4. Streamlining Category Management with Automation

Managing e-commerce categories often involves complex merging or splitting to reflect product updates and seasonal changes. We automated this process, allowing our team to efficiently execute category restructures without risking SEO disruptions or creating duplicate content issues.

Results and Takeaways

Over the course of this project, not only did we achieve a substantial reduction in crawl waste, but we also supported organic growth—with sessions reaching 30 million per month. These outcomes demonstrate that strategic crawl budget management and technical SEO automation can profoundly impact large-scale websites’ performance.

Explore Our Approach in Detail

If you’re interested in learning more about how we implemented these strategies and the insights gained along the way, we invite you to read the full engineering case study on our blog: https://engineering.skroutz.gr/blog/SEO-Crawl-Budget-Optimization-2019/.

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Conclusion

Optimizing crawl budget is a critical yet often overlooked aspect of technical SEO, particularly for large e-commerce platforms. Through deliberate pruning of low-value URLs, development of custom monitoring tools, and automation of complex processes, we managed to enhance our site’s efficiency and visibility significantly. We hope our experience provides valuable insights for SEO professionals aiming to improve their site’s technical health at scale.