In 2024, websites are losing traffic not because of bad content, but because of technical errors. One of the main culprits is the incorrect structure of internal relinking, which directly affects the Crawl Budget of search bots.
What is Crawl Budget?
It is the number of pages that Googlebot is willing and able to scan for a certain period. If your site is large and the structure is not optimized, the bot won’t reach key pages – and you lose traffic.
Fact: A study by Onely found that up to 90% of pages on large sites don’t make it into the index, despite their value. This is often due not to content, but to a poor internal grid.
Where Crawl Budget loses out:
- Broken links and 404s;
- Linking to duplicate and filter pages;
- Deeply buried pages with no inbound links;
- Lack of logical hierarchy.
Real case study:
E-commerce site after implementing an automated internal relinking system increased indexing coverage by 37%. The algorithm prioritized links to important pages, and the bot started scanning them regularly. Result – +18% traffic in a month without new content and links.
The solution is automation:
On large sites, manual linking is expensive, time-consuming, and unstable. Tools like Internal Link Builder, Link Whisper, SEO Autolinker (and custom Python solutions) allow you to:
- Arrange links based on key topics;
- Update the structure when content changes;
- Exclude pages with low value;
- Consider frequency and position of the query.
Conclusion:
Proper internal structure and economical use of Crawl Budget – the basis of modern SEO. If you are working with a site of 1000 pages or more, automating linking is no longer an “option” but a necessity.