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Crawl budget

The number of pages a search engine is willing to fetch from a site in a given period.

It is a real constraint only on large sites, and it is invoked far more often than it applies. A site of a few hundred pages will not run out.

Where it bites is on sites that generate URLs: faceted navigation, search result pages, session parameters, endless pagination. A crawler spends its allowance on those and never reaches the pages that matter.

It is one of the arguments for keeping a generated URL set small and deliberate rather than publishing every combination a template can produce.

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