Crawl budget refers to the number of pages that search engines can and want to crawl on your website within a specific time period. The crawl budget is not a fixed number; it can change over time depending on various factors, such as the size of your website, its popularity, and its freshness.
Search engines use bots, also known as spiders or crawlers, to crawl your website and index its pages. Crawling is the process of following links on your website to discover new pages and update the index.
The crawl budget is the highest number of pages that search engines can crawl in a given time. Search engines prioritize pages that are most relevant and valuable to their users. The pages that are deemed less valuable or less relevant to users may not be crawled, or they may be crawled less frequently.
The crawl budget is important because it determines how many of your pages will be indexed by search engines. If your website has a limited crawl budget, search engines may not be able to crawl all your pages, and as a result, some of your pages may not appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). It can hurt your website’s visibility and traffic.
So, it’s essential to optimize your crawl budget to check and make sure that search engines can crawl and index all the pages that matter.
A Brief Guide to Crawl Budget Optimization
To optimize your crawl budget, you need to focus on making your website more crawlable and ensuring that search engines can easily discover and index your pages. Here are some tips for optimizing your crawl budget:
- Stopping Google from crawling non-canonical URLs
Despite the fact that there were only about 25,000 indexable URLs, Google only crawled slightly more than half of them in a month. Google’s crawl budget permitted more than the grand total of indexable URLs. However, the remainder was directly spent on non-indexable URLs.
- Optimizing your JavaScript to improve page load times
A large enterprise website’s customer switched from client-side to server-side rendering (SSR). We could see almost immediately from log file analysis that Google devoted more time to the website’s critical content. Google did not need to spend time on JavaScript files or API calls because it was receiving each fully-loaded page from the server.
- Reducing crawl errors and non-200 status codes
To prevent search engine bots from wriggling bad URLs and to avoid linking to pages of non-200 status codes, make sure you’re linking to the live and selected version of your URLs throughout your content to stop wasting your crawl budget. As a general rule, avoid linking to URLs that aren’t the final destination of your content.
- Using Google Search Console to check your crawl rate limit
Google allows users to change the crawl rate of Googlebot on their site. This tool has the potential to affect your crawl rate, which is part of how Google assesses your site’s crawl budget, so it’s critical to understand.
- Increasing the number of visitors to your sites
Google tends to scan websites that are more well-known online. By examining a page’s depth, Google may determine a page’s popularity or, at the very least, relative significance.
Optimizing Crawl Budget for SEO
An SEO crawl budget can directly affect how search engines crawl and index your website. Prioritizing your most important pages and reducing crawl errors can ensure your website is crawled efficiently.
Google crawl budget refers to the number of pages on a website that the Googlebot crawls and indexes during a given period. It essentially limits how much Google is willing to crawl a particular website.
Generally, Google crawls and indexes websites by following links from one page to another. As it crawls pages, it adds them to its index, which is a database of all the pages it has crawled.
Optimizing your SEO crawl budget can involve several strategies, such as prioritizing important pages, reducing crawl errors, using internal linking, and ensuring mobile-friendliness. By implementing these tactics, you can help search engines efficiently crawl and index your website, improving SEO performance.
Factors that Impact Your SEO Crawl Budget:
- The website’s size
- The website’s speed and performance
- The website’s internal linking structure
- The website’s crawl errors
- The website’s mobile-friendliness
By understanding how Google crawls and indexes websites and the factors that impact the SEO crawl budget, website owners can optimize their websites to ensure that Google is efficiently crawling and indexing their most important pages. This can lead to improved search engine rankings and visibility, ultimately driving more traffic and conversions to the website.
