Posted inBasic SEO SEO Strategies

How We Optimized Three Sites with Yoast for Faster Crawling, Cleaner Indexing, and Better SEO

Infographic showing Yoast SEO crawl optimization, internal search cleanup, breadcrumbs, and RSS feed credit improvements
Key Yoast SEO settings applied to SEOlutions.com, MobileWiseGuy.com, and WirelessConsultant.net for faster crawling and cleaner indexing

Related: How long do SEO changes take to show up in Google? (Days to months + Search Console)

Quick answer: Crawl optimization is making it easier for Google to find, crawl, and index your important pages — without wasting crawl budget on junk URLs.

What I’m doing on my site: reduce crawl noise, fix indexing issues faster, and use Search Console to confirm what changed.

Yoast SEO Crawl Optimization: Faster Crawling and Cleaner Indexing for WordPress

I used Yoast’s crawl optimization settings across SEOlutions.com, MobileWiseGuy.com, and WirelessConsultant.net to cut junk URLs, clean up WordPress clutter, and help search engines focus on the pages that actually matter.

Cleaner crawl paths Fewer junk URLs Better internal structure Simple WordPress win

Direct answer: Yoast crawl optimization settings help by removing useless WordPress output, tightening internal search behavior, and making it easier for Google to spend time on real pages instead of junk. This is one of the simplest technical cleanups a WordPress site owner can make.

Why this page matters

This post is part of my live 90-Day AI Search Visibility Sprint. I am not just writing theory. I am applying these settings on real sites, watching what changes, and documenting what is worth keeping.

1Crawl Optimization

Strip out WordPress extras that do not help users or rankings.

2Search Cleanup

Keep thin internal search URLs out of the index and reduce spammy searches.

3Breadcrumbs

Strengthen navigation and create extra internal links automatically.

4RSS Credit

Add attribution back to your site if scrapers copy your feed content.

What Yoast crawl optimization actually does

  • Removes clutter that WordPress adds by default but most sites do not need.
  • Reduces the number of low-value URLs search engines can waste time on.
  • Helps important posts and pages stand out more clearly.
  • Makes your site cleaner for both users and search engines.
Important: This does not magically rank a weak site. It is a cleanup move. It helps good pages get more of Google’s attention by removing noise.

Step by step: the settings I used

1) Crawl Optimization

  1. Go to Yoast SEO → Settings → Crawl optimization.
  2. Turn ON the removals for shortlinks, REST API links, RSD/WLW, oEmbed links, generator tag, pingback header, and powered-by header.
  3. Turn ON the feed removals for category, tag, author, post type, search, Atom, and RDF feeds.
  4. Turn ON emoji cleanup and add the disallow setting for the WP-JSON API if it fits your setup.
Why I like this: fewer junk URLs, slightly lighter pages, and a better crawl focus on content that can actually rank.

2) Internal Site Search Cleanup

  1. Go to Yoast SEO → Settings → Internal site search cleanup.
  2. Enable Filter search terms and set the max length to 50.
  3. Turn ON filters for emojis, special characters, and common spam patterns.
  4. Turn ON the redirect from pretty search URLs to raw ?s= format.
  5. Turn ON the option that prevents crawling of internal search URLs.

Optional robots.txt add-on

# Block internal search result pages
User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /page/*/?s=
Why I like this: internal search pages are usually thin, repetitive, and not where I want Google spending time. This helps keep the index cleaner.

3) Breadcrumbs

  1. Go to Yoast SEO → Settings → Breadcrumbs and enable them.
  2. Set the separator to » and keep the homepage label as Home.
  3. For posts, show the category. Leave formats and tags as None.
  4. Place breadcrumbs above your post content using your theme option, shortcode, or block method.
Why I like this: breadcrumbs improve navigation, add internal links, and can look cleaner in search results than long messy URLs.

4) Special Pages

  • Search page title: You searched for %%searchphrase%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%
  • 404 page title: Page not found %%sep%% %%sitename%%
  • Keep both out of the index so they do not compete with real content.
Why I like this: better user experience without polluting the index with pages that should not rank.

5) RSS Feed Credit

  1. Go to Yoast SEO → Settings → RSS.
  2. Leave the before each post field blank.
  3. Add this to the after each post field:
This post %%POSTLINK%% first appeared on %%BLOGLINK%% — visit for the full SEO journey and updates.
Why I like this: if a scraper republishes your feed content, there is still a built-in link back to your original site.

Why I’m doing this across multiple sites

I used the same base setup on SEOlutions.com, MobileWiseGuy.com, and WirelessConsultant.net because I want all three sites to launch or grow from a cleaner technical base. GangsterMobile.com is next. I would rather fix this now than clean up a bigger mess later.

How I check whether this is working

  • Look in Google Search Console for indexing cleanup and crawl behavior over time.
  • Run a site:yourdomain.com search and look for fewer weird search and feed URLs.
  • Watch whether important posts get crawled and indexed more cleanly after cleanup.
  • Track whether stronger content starts getting more impressions once the junk fades.

Three related pages worth reading next

My next move: keep tightening the pages Google is already surfacing, then measure whether the cleanup helps those pages get crawled and understood more efficiently.

Follow the sprint here if you want to see how I apply this kind of cleanup to the rest of the site.

Ready to go further? Explore Advanced SEO techniques next.

Related:

Want to see these strategies in action? Explore our SEO Case Studies to see what worked.

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