If you’re not too familiar with the term “crawl budget,” it’s basically how often search engines like Google send out “spiders” or “bots” to crawl and index websites.
And while this might not seem like something you need to worry about, if you want your website to rank well on search engines, it’s actually a pretty big deal.
Crawl budget is a very important but often overlooked aspect of SEO. Here’s what you need to know about it.
What is a website crawl budget?
A website crawl budget is the time and resources Google spends crawling a website. The actual crawl limit varies from website to website and is influenced by factors such as the size of the website, the level of activity on the website, and the design and structure of the website.
A good rule of thumb is that a small website (<1000 pages) can probably be crawled in its entirety during each visit, while a larger website (>10,000 pages) may need to be crawled over multiple visits, or may require specialized crawling techniques such as priority crawling.
The hosting server and the crawl capacity limit work together
The Googlebot must establish a calculated limit on the number of parallel connections when crawling your site so that it does not overload your servers. This is to ensure that all important content is included in the crawl while avoiding server issues.
The maximum amount of crawls your website can handle will depend on a few conditions:
- Server response to the crawling session: If the site responds quickly, Googlebot can crawl more connections. If the site slows down when the crawling is searching the website resources or has server errors, then Googlebot will crawl less.
- The site owner has set a limit in Search Console: If website owners want, they can limit Googlebot’s crawling on their site. Note that automatically increasing limits won’t increase the crawling budget.
- Google’s crawling limits: Google has a ton of server power, but we can’t assume it’s infinite. We need to be aware of how much we’re using and conserve where possible.
Why is a website crawl budget important for SEO?
When it comes to SEO, the budget is important because if search engine spiders notice that your server power is reaching a stress moment because of it, this can lead to slower page loading times and even downtime.
On the other hand, if search engine spiders don’t visit all the pages on your website, they may miss important content and key phrases that could be used to improve your website’s ranking in search results.
How does the crawl budget affect your website SEO?
Crawl budget is a value measured on kilobytes or megabytes that results in the number of times a search engine spider can visit your website in a given period of time. Your website SEO can be affected positively or negatively depending on your crawl budget.
If your crawl budget is too low, your website may not be indexed by the search engines as often as you would like, which can hurt your rankings. On the other hand, the crawl budget is intrinsically related to three major things
- The type of website: How frequent is the content of the updated
- Technical performance of the site: on site level and on server level
- Google’s own discretion of compute resources assigned to the website.
How does Google calculate the Crawl Budget for each website?
Google fingerprint content as it crawls it. This means the content that is crawled and indexed for the first time will have a “signature” assigned to it, and it will be used to compare to future versions of the same content. This allows Google, among other things:
- Determine if changes have been made.
- Should that content be included in the search results?.
- Duplication.
- Frequency of changes made.
- Frequency and speed of crawling.
- Crawl rate set by the website admin
- Server capacity, and overall website health.
How can you optimize your website for search engine crawling?
It’s important to keep your website up-to-date with fresh content and a positive user experience to ensure a good crawl budget. This will also positively impact your website’s search engine rankings.
Here are some ways to optimize for crawling:
- Make sure your website is set up properly with a sitemap and correct technical settings.
- Keep your content fresh and avoid duplicate content.
- Improve page load speeds, as slow-loading pages can decrease crawling frequency.
- Monitor crawl errors and fix any issues.
- Use proper keywords, meta tags, and alt text for images to improve search engine crawling.
- Make sure all of your pages are accessible to Google.
- Limit the use of plugins and scripts that could slow down the crawling process.
- Use Google Search Console to submit new and updated pages for crawling.
- Reduce your website click depth.
- Avoid wasting the crawling limits on content that will not represent ranking potentials. (Pagination, login pages, landing pages with little content in them, etc)
- Make sure your hosting server can handle the incoming traffic without breaking your website.
- Add schema markups to help the crawler quickly understand what the content is all about.
By keeping these tips in mind, you will week optimized your website for a better crawl budget and ultimately improve your SEO.
Where can you see your website crawl budget
You can see your website’s crawl budget in Google Search Console. To do this, log into your GSC account and go to the Settings > Crawl Stats report. Here, you’ll see how many times Googlebot has crawled your site in the past 90 days, as well as the average time per day that it spends on your site.
If you’re not happy with your website’s crawl budget, apply the tips mentioned about to improve it.
Note: There is nothing you can do to tell google to increase your crawl budget. Because the algorithm is prepared to increase by itself based on the conditions mentioned above.
The shocking truth about crawl budget
The crawl budget has nothing to do with content quality. You can have fantastic content on your pages, that might probably rank very well on Google, but that content never changes. The crawl ratio is more about the number of times (how often) Google crawls your website based on the frequency of its changes or updates.
Crawling frequency depends on many factors, not just the quality of your content. So don’t ignore the crawl budget, but also keep focusing on creating high-quality content for your audience.
7 Crawl budgets facts:
- You should use it to your advantage.
- It’s quite small.
- The crawl budget is often overlooked by webmasters.
- It is not possible to fix it without fixing the website’s architecture.
- Crawl budget is a very important but often overlooked aspect of SEO.
- By optimizing for it, you can improve your website’s rankings and overall performance in search engines.
Which website size should pay more attention to its crawl budget?
Large websites are the first to worry about reaching the crawl limit. Search engines like Google can only crawl a certain number of pages on your site at any one time, and larger sites have more pages that can potentially be crawled.
This means that important pages may not be found by the search engines if you don’t optimise your website to make good use of the crawl budget.
To help you understand this, here’s an example of the size of a website:
- Under 10000 URLs: Small website
- Over 10000 up to about 500000 URLs: Medium website
- Over 500000 URLs: You should start contenting us to make better use of your crawl budget, ASAP!
🏆 Pro tip: The crawl budget itself is not your problem, your problem is your server setup. It is there where you optimize your website crawl budget.
But smaller websites should also consider their crawl budget and how it may impact their SEO efforts. Crawling too many low-quality pages can prevent important pages from being discovered and indexed. It’s important to regularly audit your website and remove any unnecessary or low-quality pages that may be using up the crawl budget without providing any real value.
Because the sooner the search engine discovers your best pages, the better it is for your rankings.
Pay Attention to the Crawl Window
The crawl window is the moment when the algorithm went over your website to crawl it. This window is important because it will let you know when is the best time to post your new content so the crawler can see it and index it.
🏆 Pro tip: enable your sitemap to be updated as soon as a new URL is created.
Crawl budget pitfalls that you should not fall into
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation out there about the crawl budget. For this reason, too many people fall into these common traps
1) Crawling more pages means better rankings – This isn’t necessarily true. Crawl budgets are about how often a search engine crawls your site and how many pages it crawls. But if your pages are low quality, your crawl budget means nothing.
2) Block everything except pages and posts to save crawl budget – While it’s important to use our site’s crawl budget wisely, you must be careful not to block important resources that Google can use to interpret your site correctly. For example, CSS and JS files.
Conclusion
Your website’s crawl budget is the number of pages that Googlebot can and wants to crawl on your website. A good crawl budget indicates that your website is being crawled efficiently and effectively by Googlebot, which can have a positive impact on your website’s SEO.
In summary these are the factors that can affect your website’s crawl budget:
- Make sure your website is set up properly with a sitemap and correct technical settings.
- Keep your content fresh and avoid duplicate content.
- Improve page load speeds, as slow-loading pages can decrease crawling frequency.
- Monitor crawl errors and fix any issues.
- Use proper keywords, meta tags, and alt text for images to improve search engine crawling.
- Make sure all of your pages are accessible to Google.
- Limit the use of plugins and scripts that could slow down the crawling process.
- Use Google Search Console to submit new and updated pages for crawling.
- Reduce your website click depth.
- Avoid wasting the crawling limits on content that will not represent ranking potentials. (Pagination, login pages, landing pages with little content in them, etc)
- Make sure your hosting server can handle the incoming traffic without breaking your website.
- Add schema markups to help the crawler quickly understand what the content is all about.
If you aren’t sure how the crawl budget of your website is affecting your search engine visibility, you can contact us to help you optimise it and rank your business better in the search engines results.
