What is a Crawl Budget?
The crawl budget is known as the number of web pages that a search engine will crawl in a given amount of time.
Search engines base their crawl demand (how frequently they’d like to crawl a site) and crawl limit calculations on these two variables. Because search engines won’t be able to crawl your website if you waste the crawl budget efficiently, your SEO performance will suffer.
Why is Crawl Budget important?
- A crawl budget is important as it permits crawler bots to access a website’s pages and makes sure that newly created material is immediately recognized and indexed.
- A page won’t rank anywhere or for anything if Google doesn’t index it.
- Therefore, if the quantity of pages on your site exceeds the crawl budget for that site, some of those pages won’t be indexed.
- To offer your website a fair chance of ranking on Google, it is important to make sure that crawler bots and spiders can find and index its pages.
How to Optimize Crawl Budget?
- Update Content– Rewrite any pages with poor material, and update frequently. Ensure that every piece of content is original, and add new pages. This will increase the need for crawling.
- Boost website speed– The more queries your site can process, the faster it can operate. The crawl rate cap will be improved as a result.
- Be sure to include internal links- The crawler bots appreciate your site’s abundance of internal links since they make it easier for them to explore your site and index it more rapidly.
Factors Affecting Crawl Budget
Server and Hosting Setup
Google takes into account the stability of each website. Googlebot will not crawl a site that crashes frequently.
Session Identifiers & Faceted Navigation
If your website contains a large number of dynamic pages, it may cause issues with dynamic URLs as well as accessibility.
Duplicate Content
Content Duplication can be a significant issue because it provides no value to Google users.
Rendering
Network Requests made during rendering may be deducted from your crawling budget.
How to improve Crawl Budget?
- Examine the URLs with 200 status codes to find those that don’t require crawling.
- Make non-essential pages with 200 status codes inaccessible to crawlers by adding forbidden rules to your robots.txt file.
- Remove internal links to 404 pages and, where appropriate, redirect them.
- Removing all non-200 status code sites from XML sitemaps.
