One of the most underrated concepts in SEO is that of a crawl budget. This article will look at what it is and why it is such an important topic, especially for very large websites with tens of thousands of pages.
In short, the crawl budget is the number of web pages that Google’s spiders crawl on your website on a given day. It depends on the size of a website, the number of errors Google encounters on a website and the number of links to the website.
Google’s bots are usually busy trying to access millions of web pages. In fact, the entire SEO domain is wary of seeking attention from crawlers. SEO specialists want bots to crawl as much of their web pages as possible, to ensure that more and more pages are indexed and ranked.
About the author
Julia Nesterets is the founder of SEO crawler Jet octopus
But the web is a vast and vast universe of pages and other online resources such as JavaScript and CSS files and mobile page variants, etc. Therefore, it is virtually impossible for search engine bots to crawl and index everything. At the same time, search engines must keep their indexes up to date to include all important content.
Search engines don’t have unlimited resources; therefore, they should prioritize their crawl efforts. They must determine:
– How to prioritize web pages over others
– What content to crawl (and what to ignore)
– Whether to recrawl certain pages often or never go back to them
These factors determine how search engines access and index online content. That’s where the crawl budget and its optimization come into play.
The crawl budget is the number of pages that the bots crawl and index within a specific time frame. If search engines cannot crawl your page, it will not be ranked in the SERPs. That is, if the number of web pages exceeds your crawl budget, you will have more pages that are not crawled and indexed.
By allocating a crawl budget, search bots can efficiently crawl your website and thereby boost your SEO efforts. It is the way the search engine distributes attention among the millions of pages available on the Internet.
Thus, crawl budget optimization can ensure that the most critical content on your site is crawled and indexed.
Google explains that most websites don’t have to worry about the crawl budget. However, if a website is quite large, spiders should prioritize what to crawl and when. In addition, they must determine how many resources the server hosting the website can allocate for crawling.
Several factors such as low-quality URLs, broken or redirected links, duplicate content, wrong indexing control issues, broken pages, site speed issues, hreflang tags issues, and overuse of AMP pages can affect your crawl budget. By managing these factors, users and crawlers can easily access your most critical content and avoid losing crawl budget.
In addition, it is critical to monitor how the crawlers visit your site and access its content. Google Search Console can provide you with useful information about your site’s ranking in the index and search performance. You can also find a crawl statistics report in the Legacy Tools section that shows the bot’s activity on your site in the last 90 days.
Server log analysis can also tell you exactly when the crawlers visit your site and which pages they visit often. Automated SEO crawlers and log analyzers can search your log files to find broken links and errors bots encountered while crawling your site. Furthermore, the tool can monitor your redirects and optimize your crawl budget to ensure that the bots are crawling and indexing as many important pages as possible.
Wasting or not optimizing your crawl budget equates to hurting your SEO performance. Pay special attention to the crawl budget if:
What about SEO pruning?
Google algorithms are trained to put quality over quantity. That’s why it’s a good idea to trim or trim the poorly performing web pages, which will optimize the crawl budget and improve your domain’s Quality Score and UX.
The process of removing outdated and poorly performing web pages or content from Google’s indexing is called SEO pruning. However, it may not be necessary to remove these pages from a website (although it sometimes seems like the best option!).
