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Technical SEO essentials: crawl hygiene for UK SME sites

Index bloat, faceted URLs, soft 404s and redirect chains — the low-drama fixes that keep Google focused on pages that earn money.

17 July 20269-min readGet Marketing Online

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Large enterprises worry about crawl budget at planetary scale. SMEs still lose rankings when hundreds of junk URLs dilute signals or when soft 404s burn crawl on faceted search pages. A quarterly technical pass pays off.

Coverage tab triage

Excluded by noindex: intentional or accidental?
Duplicate without user-selected canonical: fix canonical tags or parameters.
Crawled — currently not indexed: usually quality or duplication — merge or improve.

Sitemaps and robots.txt

Keep XML sitemaps to indexable canonical URLs only. robots.txt should block genuinely private paths — not whole sections you still want indexed.

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