🧭 Overview
When OTTO crawls your website, it scans every accessible page by default — including template pages, thank-you pages, tag archives, and other low-value URLs that you may not want audited. This can lead to two common frustrations: unexpected credit consumption and SEO Health Score volatility caused by issues surfacing on pages you never intended to optimize. This article explains how page exclusions work, how to configure them correctly, and what to expect from your SEO Health Score after making fixes.
🤔 Why Does My SEO Health Score Show More Issues After Fixing Them?
Your SEO Health Score is recalculated every time OTTO runs a new crawl. If your score drops or new issues appear after a fix, there are a few common reasons:
- New pages were discovered: Each crawl may find additional URLs — such as paginated pages, filtered product pages, or auto-generated tag archives — that were not part of the previous scan. These newly discovered pages contribute new issues to your score.
- Template-level issues propagate widely: A single issue on a template (for example, a missing meta description on a category page template) can generate hundreds of individual issue instances, one per page that uses that template. Fixing one instance does not resolve the others.
- Recrawl after deployment: If you published fixes and triggered a new scan before the changes fully propagated (such as a caching delay), OTTO may still detect the old state on some pages.
- Dynamic content changes: Pages with dynamic titles, descriptions, or structured data can shift between crawls if the underlying content or database values changed.
The most effective way to stabilize your SEO Health Score is to exclude pages that are not part of your core SEO strategy before running audits, so the score only reflects URLs you actively want to optimize.
📋 What Types of Pages Should Be Excluded?
Not every page on your website deserves to be audited. Consider excluding the following page types to keep your audits focused and your credit usage efficient:
- Template and archive pages: Tag archives, category index pages, author pages, and date-based archive URLs that are not individually optimized.
- Utility and system pages: Thank-you pages, order confirmation pages, login and logout pages, cart and checkout pages.
- Paginated URLs: Pages like /blog/page/2/ or /?page=3 that duplicate content from the primary page.
- Parameter-based URLs: Filtered or sorted views such as /products?color=blue&sort=asc that are dynamically generated and not independently meaningful.
- Staging or development paths: Any URL patterns that belong to test environments or internal tools not intended for public search visibility.
⚙️ How to Configure Page Exclusions in OTTO
Follow these steps to exclude specific pages or URL patterns from OTTO's crawl and audits:
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Log in to your Search Atlas account and navigate to OTTO SEO in the left-hand sidebar, then open SEO Automation.
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Select the project (website) you want to configure.
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Open the Crawl Settings or Site Settings for that project.
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Locate the URL Exclusions field. This is where you enter the URL patterns you want OTTO to skip during future crawls.
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Enter each URL pattern you want to exclude. You can use:
- An exact URL path (e.g., /thank-you/) to exclude a single page.
- A partial path or prefix (e.g., /tag/) to exclude all URLs that begin with or contain that string, such as all tag archive pages.
- A query parameter pattern (e.g., ?page=) to exclude paginated or filtered URLs that share a common parameter.
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Save your exclusion settings.
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Trigger a new crawl so OTTO re-audits the site with the exclusions applied. Your SEO Health Score will be recalculated based only on the pages that remain in scope.
Once exclusions are saved, OTTO will skip the matching URLs in all subsequent crawls, which reduces credit consumption and prevents low-value pages from affecting your SEO Health Score.
💡 Tips for Maintaining a Stable SEO Health Score
- Set exclusions before your first full crawl on a new project whenever possible, so your baseline score is clean from the start.
- Review newly discovered URLs after each crawl by checking the full URL list in your audit results. If unexpected page types appear, add their patterns to your exclusion list.
- Fix template-level issues at the source — correcting a meta description or title tag in your CMS template will resolve the issue across all pages using that template in a single fix, rather than page by page.
- Allow caching to clear before triggering a re-crawl after deploying fixes, so OTTO picks up the updated page state accurately.
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.
Additional Notes
Rule updates — Search Atlas periodically refines its SEO audit rules, which can surface issues that were previously uncategorized. Also notes: fixing one high-impact template issue can resolve hundreds of individual instances at once.