So we just covered that meta noindex doesn’t save crawl budget with Google and that question and answer was fairly obvious to most of you. But how about the canonical tag, does it save crawl budget? The answer would appear to be no. Again, GoogleBot needs to crawl the page to pick up on that there is a canonical tag on the page – so the crawl is used there.

But John Mueller said pretty much the same thing on Twitter when asked if the canonical tags save crawl budget. He said “probably not” and added “or not much.” He explained that GoogleBot “have to pick a canonical & have to crawl the dups to see that they’re dups anyway.”

Here is the tweet:

Why not much? I assume because Google probably crawls the other URL version less often after picking up on the canonical tag.

Forum discussion at Twitter.