SEO question that only bites at scale. on a small site crawl budget is a non-issue, but a huge tube with hundreds of thousands of pages, videos, tags, categories, paginated archives, can genuinely exceed what search engines will crawl, so your deep pages get crawled rarely or not at all and never rank. the levers are the usual, a clean site structure, good internal linking, sitemaps, pruning thin and duplicate pages so the crawl goes to pages worth having, and not wasting crawl on infinite parameter combinations. so at what scale does crawl budget actually become a real constraint, how do you tell if your deep pages are being under-crawled, and what actually moves the needle on getting search engines to reach and index the pages you care about on a genuinely large tube?
this is usually the biggest crawl fix on a big tube. the filter and sort parameters make almost infinite near-duplicate urls and they eat all the crawl. close that off first with parameter handling and canonicals. if the crawler is busy on filter combinations your real pages get starved no matter how nice your sitemap is.
look in your server logs and the crawl stats in search console. they show you exactly which pages the bot visit and how often, so you dont guess, you see it. the logs tell you which sections the crawler like and which ones it ignore, and that is where your deep pages are starving.
the way to know it worked is to watch the crawl move in your logs afterward. once you shut off the infinite parameter urls you should see the bot start spending its time on your real pages instead. if it doesnt, theres another sink still soaking up the budget and you go find that one. close the leak, then check the logs to see where the crawl actually went.
the thing is a lot of this is upstream, not cleanup. the cms keeps auto-spinning thin tag and archive pages the moment you add a post, so if you just delete them they come right back. you have to go into the settings and turn off generating and indexing those page types in the first place.