Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot will crawl on your site in a given timeframe. For most sites under 10,000 pages, it's not a limiting factor. But for large ecommerce sites, news portals, or domain portfolios, inefficient crawling means important pages get indexed slower or not at all. Start by auditing what Google is actually crawling. In Search Console, check the Pages report and look for excluded URLs. If you see thousands of pages marked as duplicate, noindexed, or soft 404s, you're wasting crawl budget on junk. Remove or consolidate them. Common culprits are faceted navigation URLs, tag archives, print versions, and session IDs in query strings. Server performance matters more than most people think. If your time to first byte is over 500ms, Googlebot will throttle requests to avoid overloading your server. We aim for sub-200ms TTFB on critical pages. Use a CDN, optimize database queries, and enable compression. A fast server signals to Google that it can crawl more aggressively. Robots.txt should block low-value sections, not just disallow them in meta tags. Blocking /wp-admin/, /cgi-bin/, or internal search results (?s=) in robots.txt prevents crawlers from even requesting those URLs. Don't block anything you want indexed, obviously. Use noindex for pages you want accessible to users but not search engines. Internal linking architecture is underrated. Pages buried six clicks deep get crawled infrequently. Flatten your site structure so priority pages are two to three clicks from the homepage. In our portfolio, we've seen indexing speed double just by adding internal links from high-authority pages to new content. Finally, fix broken links and redirect chains. Every 404 or multi-hop 301 wastes a crawl request. Run a Screaming Frog audit monthly, fix the errors, and update internal links to point directly to final destinations. For sites with 50,000+ pages, this alone can free up 20-30% more crawl budget for pages that actually matter.