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Crawl Budget

What is a Crawl Budget and How to Optimize It?

There are times when Google does not spider every page of a website immediately after it has been created. Sometimes, it can even take weeks for the process to be completed. You might need help optimizing your site for technical SEO if this happens. There’s a chance that you might not get indexed for your newly optimized landing page. The crawl budget needs to be optimized at that point. What is a crawl budget, and how can you optimize it? We’ll discuss these topics in this article.

What is a Crawl Budget?

There is no specific financial fee defined in the crawl budget. The definition provided here is a more figurative one. The term crawling budget refers to the number of pages that Google crawls on your site during a certain period. Google crawls many pages daily, varying considerably from five fifteen hundred and even five hundred thousand pages. The numbers given above are all understandable and possible to understand.

In what ways does the crawl budget google affect you? It is essential that Google indexes and crawls your page to show it in the SERPs. You still have several pages on your site that cannot be crawled and, therefore, are not indexed by Google if the number of pages crawled daily exceeds the number of pages on your site. These pages need to be highlighted and presented to Google, which is an important message.

How Does a Crawler Work?

Googlebot crawls, for example, and receives a list of URLs to crawl on a site. A systematic review of that list is conducted. Your robots.txt file is periodically checked to see if it’s still allowed to crawl each URL, and then each URL is crawled individually. After crawling and parsing a URL, a spider adds all the URLs it found on the page to its to-do list so they can be crawled again.

A URL may need to be crawled due to a variety of events. If Google finds that it needs to crawl a URL, it adds it to its list of things to do. For instance, it might have found new links pointing to the URL, or someone might have tweeted it, or it might have been updated in the XML sitemap.

How Does Google Determine the Crawl Budget?

Google’s crawl budget describes how much time and resources the search engine is willing to spend crawling your website. This equation can be expressed as follows:

Crawl Budget = Crawl Rate + Crawl Demand

The number of landing pages, domain authority, backlinks, site speed, crawl errors, and site speed all influence the crawl error rate of a website. Generally, larger sites are crawled more frequently than smaller ones, slower ones, or those with too many redirects and server errors.

In addition, Google calculates the crawl budget based on “crawl demand.” Popular URLs have a higher crawl demand because the company wants to provide users with the freshest content. A page that has not crawled in some time will also have a higher demand on Google since it doesn’t like stale content. If you move your website, you will need to increase crawl demand in your Google index. Google will update its index more quickly if your new URLs are added.

Crawl budgets for websites need to be fixed, and they can fluctuate. Increasing server hosting or website speed may encourage Googlebot to crawl your site more often, knowing your site does not slow down the user experience. Look at your Google Search Console Crawl Report for more information about your site’s average crawl rate.

Crawling Budget and SEO: How Are They Related?

You must first have your pages indexed by Google before ranking them.

You will only be able to crawl pages on your site if your crawl budget is within the number of pages. The crawl budget is heavily influenced by website size, as we mentioned earlier. The ability of Google to crawl many sites within a short period of time has improved over the years. 

Therefore, the crawl budget in SEO is not a factor you need to worry about if you have a small website. If the number of URLs on a website is less than 1,000, Google can crawl it easily. 

It becomes problematic when you have more than 5K or 10K web pages on your site or when pages are automatically generated based on URL parameters. Optimizing your crawl budget becomes crucial at this point. 

When is Crawl Budget an Issue?

There is a problem with crawl budgets now. Crawl budgets are fine if Google has to crawl many URLs on your site. Some pages will be crawled more than others (such as the homepage). Consider this scenario: you have 250,000 pages on your website, but Google crawls 2,500 daily. The time it takes for Google to notice changes to your pages could be 200 days if you don’t take action. Meanwhile, if it crawls 50,000 pages daily, there’s no problem.

You can determine whether or not your site has a crawl budget issue by following the steps below. In the above example, you assume that Google crawls and doesn’t index a relatively small number of URLs on your site (for instance, because you added meta noindex).

  • Your XML sitemap may be a good starting point for determining how many pages you have on your site.
  • You need to log in to the Google Search Console.
  • The fastest way to determine how many pages are crawled per day for your website is to go to “Settings” -> “Crawl stats.”
  • Take the number of pages and divide it by the number of crawls per day that are occurring on average.
  • In cases where you have 10x more pages than what Google crawls daily, you should optimize your crawl budget. You can try reading something else if your score is lower than 3.

Do I Need to Worry About the Crawl Budget?

Popular pages rarely have a budget crawled. A page that isn’t crawled very often is usually a newer one, a poorly linked page, or a page that only changes a little.

Especially for newer sites with many pages, crawl budget can be an issue. It may be possible for your server to support more crawling, but since your site is new and not very popular yet, it may not be worthwhile for search engines to crawl it very much. There is mainly a disconnect between expectations and reality. Google may want to crawl fewer pages than you want them to crawl and index, so you want them crawled and indexed.

Sites with millions of pages or often updated content may also need to consider crawl budgets. If your website has many pages that aren’t being crawled or updated as frequently as you’d like, consider speeding up crawling. 

How Do I Check My Crawl Budget?

Use Log Analysis With Url Segmentation 

Google crawls your site monthly, and you can see how many URLs it has crawled. This is the budget you have set for Google crawls.

Understand how your crawl budget is spent by combining your log files and a full site crawl. Identify the sections of your site that are being crawled by search engines and with how much frequency by segmenting that data by page type.

What is the best way for search engines to crawl the most important sections of your site?

Use the Crawls Venn Diagram

The Crawls Venn Diagram is a great way to see, at a high level, which pages Googlebot crawls and which pages it does not crawl. These Venn diagrams show that Google crawls your site architecture pages (orphan pages).

Your crawl budget can be improved only by improving the pages crawled by Google. There may be some crawl budget wasted if those pages aren’t linked anywhere on your site, but Google still finds and crawls them.

Each site has a different crawl ratio. Approximately 60% of website pages need to be crawled regularly and may not be indexed. Unoptimized sites are crawled by Gomust on average only 40% of the time, regardless of industry. 

Measuring and optimizing crawl budgets is a strong business case.

Checking Your Crawl Rate Limit in Google Search Console

Googlebot gives you the option of changing its crawl rate on your site. Google uses crawl rate limits to determine your site’s crawl budget, so understanding this tool is crucial.

Anyone can use this feature to change the crawl rate Google has determined appropriate for a site. You’re not required to use it. 

Googlebot may put too much strain on your server if its crawl rate is too high, so they give webmasters a chance to limit it. The downside is, however, that Google may find less of your important content if you do this, so be careful.

Changing the crawl rate of a property can be done from the crawl rate settings page. Google will optimize your site, and you’ll also be able to limit how many crawls Google can do. 

Make sure “Limit Google’s maximum crawl rate” has not been selected accidentally if you want to increase your crawl rate. 

Read Also: How Core Web Vitals Can Affect Your Website’s Performance?

What is Crawl Budget Optimization?

There is nothing more important than crawl budget optimization in terms of helping Googlebot, Bing, and other search engines crawl your content more extensively and index it. 

The main ways in which you can do this are as follows: 

    • Make sure you don’t want your non-indexed pages to appear on Google and other search engines 
  • You can increase your content’s visibility by helping them find it more quickly
  • Your important pages will become more popular and fresh.

How Do I Optimize My Crawl Budget?

Crawl budget optimization means not wasting the crawl budget. In monitoring thousands of websites, we see the same problem with crawl budgets across all of them: most websites are experiencing the same problems. The key to reducing wasted crawl budget is to identify its reasons.

Crawl budgets are wasted for the following reasons:

  • In this case, the parameter stores the visitor’s selection in a product filter for https://www.example.com/toys/cars?color=black.
  • Duplicate content: highly similar or identical pages are considered duplicate content. Examples include pages copied from another source, internal search result pages, and tags.
  • Low-quality content: content on a page unrelated to the topic or does not add any value to the reader.
  • Broken and redirecting links: broken links lead to pages that no longer exist, and redirected links lead to URLs that redirect to other pages.
  • XML sitemaps with incorrect URLs: Pages not indexable should not be included in your sitemaps, including 3xx, 4xx, and 5xx URLs.
  • Pages with high load time / time-outs: A high load time or time-out affects your crawl budget because the search engines see that your website cannot handle the request and adjust your crawl budget accordingly.
  • A high number of non-indexable pages: the website contains many pages that aren’t indexable.
  • Bad internal link structure: Search engines might only pay enough attention to your pages if they have a proper internal link structure.

Conclusion

By implementing these optimizations on a site with millions of pages, you can simultaneously increase your crawl budget and your site’s traffic and revenues!

The reason behind this is that according to the SEO funnel principle, improvements made to the crawl phase of an SEO campaign will have downstream benefits for the ranking, traffic, and revenue phases of the campaign, which your stakeholders will be happy about. 

There’s more to the crawl budget than just technical issues. It’s also a revenue issue. So bring the crawlers – and visitors – only to the good stuff!

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About Author
Preeti Malik
Preeti Malik
Marketing is something that is running through my veins. I am a person who has free spirit when it comes to designing and flexible mind when it comes to understanding the requirements of the business. Creating innovative, adaptive and data-driven digital marketing plans is my strength. Helping brands to connect and engage with their audience in the most compelling voice. Handling paid and organic search, social, content, retargeting, performance display, email marketing campaigns for more than 9 years.
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