What is Crawl Budget?
Crawl budget is, number of times the google spider visits our website and crawls it in a given timeframe. The crawl budget varies day to day.
- Crawl rate limit
- Crawl demand
- How Crawler work? Yoast
- Factors affecting crawl budget
- Importance of Crawl budget in seo
- How to increase your crawl budget
Crawl rate limit
Google bot is uniquely designed to crawl the website, and its main priority is crawling. The crawler is designed in such a way that the bot crawling should not degrade the user experience, this we call as crawl rate limit.
This is done by preventing Google to crawl too many pages fast, which may cause server exhaustion. Also, the crawl rate limit will stop Google from making many requests, which will decrease the site speed. The crawl rate depends on the following factors.
- Crawl health: If your site responds very well, then your limit will go up. If the response is not well due to some technical or server issues, then the limit decreases, and the gap between two subsequent crawl will be higher.
- Console Setting: The webmasters can control the crawl limit from their search console settings. Setting a higher limit will not automatically increase the crawl rate.
Crawl Demand
Irrespective of the crawl rate, if there is a demand from Google to crawl the website, then the Google bot will automatically crawl our site. Two factors majorly play a significant role in determining the crawl budget
- Popularity: If your website or URL is more popular, then Google tends to crawl your site very frequently to keep the contents updated in its index
- Staleness: Google doesn’t want to any URL as stale in its index, so it will crawl the stale URL by creating a budget.
How crawler work?
A crawler like Google bot will take the entire list of URL in a particular site to crawl. It then cross-check with robot.txt file to find the crawling permission. Based on the robot.txt permission, it will crawl, and the parsed content will be added to the index.
Factors affecting crawl budget
- zombie pages or zero value pages will affect and decrease your crawl budget.
- Duplicate content in pages will not attract the google crawlers.
- Faceted navigation. It refers to how eCommerce website will allow their users to sort product. This method will generate a lot of dynamic URLs, which may lead to duplicate content and might affect the crawl budget.
- Using a large number of links on a page will affect your budget. Because Google crawlers usually follow the links in the body of the content, crawling those URLs might be unnecessary bandwidth for crawlers.
- Low quality or spammy content will decrease the crawl budget.
- Nobody likes your slow-loading pages, even the Google bot.
- Using tremendous redirect depth in your website will confuse your crawler and affect the budget of crawling.
- Soft 404 in your website will affect your crawl budget.
Importance of crawl budget in SEO
If you want to rank high in the search engine, you have to optimize your content, that is called SEO, right?
Let’s say that you have super optimized your content to rank high in the search engine, but the search engine haven’t crawled your page. Obviously, you won’t get ranked.
So, the crawler will help in communicating the web content to the search engine, and your crawl budget is like a container, if you have an enormous container, you can communicate a great things to your search engine.
But, the crawl budget doesn’t directly help to increase the ranking.
How to increase your crawl budget
Improving site speed
As we mentioned above, site speed will affect the budget. So, increasing the site speed will improve user’s experience as well as help the google bot.
If the page loads fast then, the crawler will crawl the page quickly, and it will have time to crawl and index all the pages in the site. Slow loading pages will destroy the crawl budget.
Adding Internal Links
Everyone knows that internal links help the user to navigate to the relevant page. Likewise, it also helps the crawler to reach different pages and crawl them. Linking your new page in high performing page will help the crawler to crawl your new page very fast.
Site Architecture
URL crawling is proportional to the link authority. If your link is popular, then the possibility of frequent crawling will be high. Maintaining a proper flat website architecture will help to increase the link authority as well as the crawl budget.
Avoid Orphan pages
Orphan pages are the pages that have no internal links within the website or external links pointing to them. It will be super difficult for the search crawlers to find those pages and crawl them.
Using less redirect chain
Using several redirect chains will take a long time for your crawler to reach the landing page. It won’t be an issue for a single redirect. But a big website with thousand of redirects will eat a large amount of crawl budget.
Using HTML
Search Engines like Google are familiar with JavaScript and other script languages. But not all search engines are that good so, using HTML will be an excellent way to adopt all the crawlers.
How to check the crawl budget?
You can check the crawl budget from the google free tool search console. You can also check the crawl status and data related to crawling.
Below is the screenshot of search console crawl status
