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

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Camilo Aponte

Camilo Aponte

Last updated on Sep 30, 2026

🔍 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. There are three supported methods.

⚙️ Method 1 — Exclude Pages in the OTTO UI Settings

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. Open the Settings tab inside the project dashboard.
  4. Locate the Crawl Exclusions or Excluded URLs section.
  5. Enter the URL patterns you want to exclude. You can use exact URLs or wildcard patterns (e.g., /shop/page/* to exclude all paginated shop pages).
  6. Click Save. Exclusions take effect on the next crawl cycle.

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

🤖 Method 2 — Use the Robots Meta Tag on Individual Pages

Add a noindex or nofollow robots meta tag directly to the HTML of pages you want OTTO to skip. OTTO respects standard robots directives.

  1. Open the page editor for the page you want to exclude (in WordPress, Shopify, or your CMS of choice).
  2. Add the following tag inside the <head> section of the page: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
  3. Publish or save the page.
  4. OTTO will honor this directive during its next crawl and will not audit that page.

Best for: Excluding individual pages or a small set of specific pages where you want the directive to live at the page level.

📄 Method 3 — Block URL Patterns via robots.txt

For large groups of template-driven URLs (such as all tag pages, all paginated URLs, or all print-preview pages), updating your robots.txt file is the most efficient approach.

  1. Access your robots.txt file via your hosting control panel, FTP, or CMS (in WordPress, plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math include a robots.txt editor).
  2. Add a Disallow rule under the relevant user-agent. To block all crawlers from a pattern, use: User-agent: * followed by Disallow: /tag/ (replace /tag/ with your target path pattern).
  3. Save and publish the updated file. Verify it is live by visiting yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
  4. OTTO will respect the Disallow directives on its next crawl.

Best for: Blocking large groups of template URLs (archive pages, paginated results, print versions) site-wide in a single edit.

Tip for designoneprinting.com users: If your print-preview or product-configurator pages are generating repeated audit issues, use Method 3 with a wildcard path pattern to exclude the entire URL group in one robots.txt update, then verify the exclusion in OTTO UI Settings using Method 1 as a secondary layer.

💳 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 using Method 1 (UI Settings) before triggering a manual crawl or enabling an automatic crawl schedule on a new project.

✅ Quick Reference — Which Method Should I Use?

  • A few specific pages: Robots meta tag (Method 2).
  • URL patterns or folders: robots.txt (Method 3).
  • Fastest setup with no site edits: OTTO UI Settings (Method 1).
  • Maximum coverage: Combine Method 1 and Method 3.

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.