Crawl Budget

Google’s bots are constantly crawling the internet, but even they have a limited budget. A crawl budget is the number of pages Google’s bots will crawl on your website within a specific period. For most small websites, this isn’t an issue. However, if you have a large website with thousands of pages, you need to be smart about how you use your crawl budget.

If Google’s bots spend their time crawling low-priority pages, they might not have enough time to crawl and index your new, important pages. This can lead to poor SEO results. The goal is to make sure your most important pages are being indexed and ranking faster.

How to Check Your Crawl Budget

You can find a lot of information about your website’s crawl budget in your search console. Look for a report called Crawl Stats. This report will show you how often Google is visiting your site and what it is spending its time on.

You can see a breakdown of different response types, such as 200 (OK), 404 (Not found), and 500 (Server error). This helps you spot pages that don’t work or are being redirected. You can also see the purpose of the crawl. Google might be crawling a page to refresh data, or to discover a new page.

How Does Google Define the Crawl Budget for Your Website?

Google uses two main factors to decide your website’s crawl budget:

• Crawl limit: How much crawling can your website’s server handle? If your server is slow, Google will reduce its crawl limit to avoid crashing your website.
• Crawl demand: How popular are your pages? If a page is updated often or gets a lot of traffic, Google will crawl it more often.

To maximize your crawl budget, you need to make sure your website is fast and that your pages are valuable and up-to-date.

How to Maximize Your SEO Crawl Budget

Technical Details First!

To make the most of your crawl budget, you need to make sure your website is in good technical shape. Your website’s speed is a huge factor. The faster your website loads, the faster a search engine’s bots can crawl it. If they can crawl dozens of pages in a few seconds, they’ll be able to crawl more.

Get Rid of Unnecessary Redirects and Broken Links

A great way to waste your crawl budget is to have unnecessary redirects and broken links. A search engine will spend time crawling these pages, only to find that they are dead ends. You should regularly audit your pages to find and fix any broken links.

Set up Your Internal Linking Properly to Maximize Your Crawl Budget

Internal links help a search engine navigate your website. If a page has no links pointing to it, it is called an orphan page, and it will be hard for a search engine to find it. You should ensure that every page on your website has at least one link pointing to it. You can also point more links to your most important pages to show a search engine which ones you want it to prioritize.

Make Your Website Easy to Navigate

Ideally, all your pages should be easy to find. A flat website structure is one where all your pages can be found with a minimal number of clicks. This ensures that a search engine can find and index your most important pages quickly.

Update Your Sitemap

Your sitemap is a reference for a search engine. If your sitemap is full of old or broken pages, you are wasting a search engine’s time. You should regularly update your sitemap to make sure it only includes the URLs you want to be indexed.

How Long Does It Take to Increase My Website Crawl Budget?

If your website is new or you have recently fixed some issues, it may take some time for your crawl budget to increase. But once you’ve applied all the advice in this article, you will see your pages being crawled and indexed faster.

Checklist: How to Maximize Your Crawl Budget

• Improve your website’s speed.
• Remove unnecessary redirects and broken links.
• Update your sitemap to exclude old or broken pages.
• Set up your internal links properly.