Google’s indexing nuances often trip up even seasoned SEOs, especially around crawl budget optimization.

A case in point: a client of mine (a mid-sized e-commerce site) saw a 40% drop in indexed pages after a site migration, despite following «best practices.» Turns out, their XML sitemap was bloated with low-value URLs, and Googlebot was wasting crawl budget on them.

This aligns with John Mueller’s advice on prioritizing quality over quantity in sitemaps. Are we underestimating how much crawl efficiency impacts indexing, especially for dynamic sites with frequent inventory changes?..