🛡️ Fix SEO Health Score Volatility and Exclude Pages from OTTO Crawls

🔍 Why Your SEO Health Score Changes After Fixing Issues

Your SEO Health Score is calculated by a continuous audit, not a one-time snapshot. Every time OTTO crawls your site, it re-evaluates all pages against the latest SEO rules. This means the score can shift up or down even after you have fixed issues — and that is expected behavior, not a bug.

Common reasons your score may show more issues after a fix:

• New pages were added — freshly published or indexed pages are crawled and audited automatically.
• Template-driven issues surfaced — if your site uses templates (e.g., WooCommerce product pages, archive pages), a single template problem can multiply across hundreds of URLs in one crawl cycle.
• Rule updates — Search Atlas periodically refines its SEO audit rules, which can surface issues that were previously uncategorized.
• Previously skipped URLs — OTTO discovers new URLs over time as your sitemap or internal links grow.

The score reflects the real-time health of everything OTTO can see. If the number of detected issues rises, focus on which issue types are flagged rather than reacting to the score alone. Fixing one high-impact template issue can resolve hundreds of individual instances at once.

🚫 How to Exclude Pages from OTTO Crawls

Excluding low-value or template pages from OTTO crawls prevents unnecessary credit consumption and keeps your audit results focused on pages that matter. The supported method is OTTO's URL Exclusion conditions, configured in your project's OTTO SEO Settings.

⚙️ Exclude Pages with URL Exclusion Conditions

This is the fastest method and does not require any changes to your website.

1. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO → SEO Automation (All Sites) (URL: /seo-automation-v3).
2. Select your project (e.g., designoneprinting.com) from the project list.
3. At the top of the project overview, click the Autopilot / Smart Crawl card to open the OTTO SEO Settings modal. You can also reach it from the All Sites table by clicking the Smart Crawl status text on your site's card.
4. Scroll to URL Exclusion conditions and click + Add condition.
5. Set the condition to Exclude all URLs that Contains or Start With the text you want to skip — for example, Contains /shop/page/ excludes all paginated shop pages.
6. Click Update Settings. Exclusions take effect on the next crawl cycle.

Best for: Quickly excluding specific URL patterns without touching your website files.

⚠️ What Does NOT Exclude Pages from OTTO

Two approaches are often recommended in general SEO guides, but neither one excludes pages from OTTO:

• Robots meta tags (noindex) — OTTO's crawler does not treat a noindex tag as an exclusion. A page carrying noindex is still crawled and can still receive OTTO optimizations. Use URL Exclusion conditions instead.
• robots.txt — OTTO ignores robots.txt unless Crawl Criteria is set to Respect robots.txt in the OTTO SEO Settings modal. Even when it is enabled, robots.txt affects every crawler that respects the file — Google included — not just OTTO. For OTTO-specific control, use URL Exclusion conditions.

Tip for designoneprinting.com users: If your print-preview or product-configurator pages are generating repeated audit issues, add URL Exclusion conditions for those paths (for example Contains /print/ or your configurator path), then re-run the audit and confirm the tracked page count drops.

💳 Understanding OTTO Credit Usage

OTTO credit consumption follows a pattern that surprises some users: the first crawl of a project is the heaviest. Here is why and what to expect:

• Initial crawl: OTTO discovers and audits every accessible URL on your site. If your site has 500 pages, all 500 are crawled and credits are consumed upfront.
• Subsequent crawls: OTTO uses incremental crawling where possible, prioritizing changed or newly discovered pages. Credit usage typically drops after the first cycle.
• Template pages multiply costs: A site with 10 product templates but 300 product pages will crawl all 300 URLs. Excluding template-driven pages before the first crawl saves the most credits.
• Crawl frequency: More frequent crawl schedules consume more credits. If credit usage is a concern, reduce crawl frequency in your project settings until exclusions are configured.

To maximize credit efficiency, set up your URL exclusions before triggering a manual crawl or enabling an automatic crawl schedule on a new project.

✅ Quick Reference — Which Method Should I Use?

• Excluding pages from OTTO: URL Exclusion conditions in OTTO SEO Settings (the method above).
• noindex tags: never exclude a page from OTTO.
• robots.txt: ignored by OTTO unless Crawl Criteria is set to Respect robots.txt — and then it affects all respectful crawlers, not just OTTO.

If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.