## **🔍 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.