In this article, we’re going to dive deeper into the world of SEO and unravel the critical yet often overlooked concept of ‘crawl budget’. This guide will illuminate how Google and other search engines navigate and index your website, and how the concept of crawl budget plays a significant role in it.
Learn about the issues that arise when the crawl budget exceeds the crawl limit, how to check your site’s crawl budget, and practical strategies for optimization.
Equip yourself with the knowledge to enhance your website’s visibility, accessibility, and ultimately, its ranking in search results. Let’s delve into the world of crawl budgets, a silent influencer of your website’s SEO performance.
What Is a Crawl Budget?
Crawl budget is a term that describes the number of web pages that Google scans on your website on a daily basis. Although there may be minor fluctuations, this figure generally maintains a consistent range.
Google has the capacity to scan from a few pages to millions of pages every day.
Crawl budgets, or the number of pages Google scans, are determined by your website’s size, user experience, and the number of links to your site.
Importantly, there are measures you can take to influence these factors, which will be discussed subsequently.
Why Is Crawl Budget Important for SEO?
Basically, a crawl budget is how much time and resources search engines, such as Google, spend scanning and indexing your site. It affects how many of your site’s pages get indexed and how quickly they appear in search engine results, which is important for SEO.
Why is it so crucial for SEO? Here’s the deal:
Better Indexation: With a larger crawl budget, search engines can explore more pages on your site, leading to more pages getting indexed. That gives your site a better chance of showing up in relevant searches.
Indexing: A larger crawl budget allows search engines to scan and index new or updated pages more quickly, allowing you to deliver fresh content sooner.
Avoiding Wasted Effort: A tight crawl budget may prevent search engines from scanning all your pages, leaving some unindexed.
Finding Problems: Monitoring crawl budgets can help identify underlying issues with your website’s architecture or technical SEO that could prevent your pages from being indexed and crawled efficiently.
What Determines the Crawl Rate of A Website?
Google considers the following factors when determining crawl budgets:
- Site Speed: Websites that load quickly enable Googlebot to crawl more pages in less time. A slower server response may result in fewer pages being crawled.
- Site Size: Because of the greater volume of content to index, larger websites typically receive a larger crawl budget.
- Site Freshness: Googlebot strives to stay abreast of new content, so frequent updates will earn a larger crawl budget.
- Inbound Links: Websites with more inbound links are given a larger crawl budget because they are deemed more important.
Search engine crawlers, such as Google’s Googlebot, are interested or required to index specific websites or webpages in response to what is known as “crawl demand.”.
A website’s popularity, frequency of content updates, and quality and relevance of its content all influence the quantity of crawl demand.
It is common for website owners and webmasters to optimize their sites for search engine crawlers in order to boost crawl demand and improve search engine rankings.
A number of techniques are utilized to facilitate search engines’ understanding of site content, including high-quality content creation, optimizing page titles and meta descriptions, and using structured data markup.
When Is Crawl Budget an Issue?
Crawl budgets are an issue when they exceed the crawl limit of a website’s server.
A crawl limit, or host load, is an important component of a crawl budget. A search engine crawler is programmed to avoid overloading the web server.
A website’s crawl limit is determined by several factors:
- Crawlers check the number of timeouts and server errors on requested URLs. A high incidence of such issues indicates that the server may be unstable.
- The crawl limit for your website may be significantly reduced if it shares a hosting platform with hundreds of other websites. In such cases, switching to a dedicated server might be beneficial, resulting in dramatically improved load times.
How to Check a Crawl Budget?
If you’re curious about your website’s crawl budget, here’s how you can check:
Google search console is your friend. It gives you all the juicy details about how Google is interacting with your website.
Just log in to your account, click on the website you want to inspect, then hit “settings” on the left menu, and finally, click “crawl stats”.
You’ll see how many pages are being checked out each day, how long it takes to download a page, and the amount of data being downloaded. If something looks off, you can use this info to identify it and fix any crawl issues.
Try a website crawling tool. There are quite a few out there, like Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, and Sitebulb.
These tools can give you a deep dive into your website’s crawl budget and highlight any problems, like issues with internal links or duplicate content. With these reports, you can optimize your site and make it more crawl-friendly.
Crawl Budget Formula
Here’s a quick way to see if your site might be having crawl budget issues.
Figure out how many pages you have on your site. A good place to start is by checking the number of URLs in your XML sitemaps.
Hop into Google search console.
Click on “settings”, then “crawl stats”, and make a note of the average number of pages crawled each day.
Take the number of pages on your site and divide it by the “average crawled per day” number.
If the number is less than 3, you’re probably in good shape.
What URLs is Google Crawling?
In order to determine which URLs Google is crawling on your website, it would be necessary for you to inspect the server logs for your website. All requests to your website, including those made by Google’s crawlers, are recorded in these logs.
There are some free tools that can help you better understand which URLs google is crawling.
Screaming Frog’s SEO log file analyzer could come in handy. The Screaming Frog log file analyzer is designed to help SEOs analyze log files and gain valuable insight into search bot behavior. With the log file analyzer, you can analyze up to 1,000 log events in a single project.
Google’s search console can also be used for understanding how Google interacts with your site.
Using the “coverage” report, you can see which pages have been crawled and indexed, as well as the “crawl stats” report, which shows when Google has crawled your site recently.
How to Limit the Crawling of Your Website?
Do you want to stop search engines, like Google, from viewing certain parts of your website? Here’s how you can do that:
- Use robots.txt File: This file acts as a map that shows Google where they can go and where they can’t on your website. If you want to keep a part of your site hidden, just edit your robot.txt file and write a disallow command referring to the page you want to keep private.
- Use Meta Tags: Meta Tages are like labels you can put on pages or links on your site. If you don’t want a certain page to show up in search results, you can use a “no index” label. If you don’t want search engines to follow a link on your site, you can use a “nofollow” label. If you use WordPress you can do so through plugging like Yoast SEO, and All-in-one-SEO.
- Use HTTP Headers: HTTP Headers serve as special instructions you can give to search engines about how to treat different parts of your website. You can tell search engines not to look at certain parts of your site using an HTTP header called “x-robots-tag.”.
How to Increase Crawl Budget? (Crawl Budget Optimization)
Enhancing your crawl budget – the number of times search engine bots visit your site – can be achieved through the following best practices:
- Deploy an up-to-date XML sitemap. This comprehensive list of your website’s pages aids bots in efficiently crawling and indexing your content.
- Optimize the speed of your website. An underperforming website can be detrimental to your crawl budget. Enhance your site speed by reducing image sizes, minifying CSS and Javascript files, and utilizing a content delivery network (CDN).
- Identify duplicate content on your site. Ensure all site content is unique and employ canonical tags to designate the preferred version of a page if keeping a number of versions of the same page is necessary for example in cases of ab testing.
- Structure your website in a logical hierarchy. Incorporate clear headings, URLs, and internal links, and facilitates bot navigation and content comprehension.
- Employ structured data to clarify website content for search engines (title, meta description, breadcrumbs). This improves your search result visibility and facilitates bot crawling.
- Consistently publish fresh, high-quality content, signifying to search engine bots that your site is active and valuable, in addition to updating old content to ensure it remains relevant and current.
- Regularly audit your website for crawl errors. resolve any issues obstructing search engine bots’ access to your site.
- Monitor your website’s crawl rate using Google Search Console. A sudden dip could signify a crawl budget issue warranting immediate attention.
Following these crawl budget optimization, best practices can increase your website’s visibility and accessibility in search engines.