Crawl Budget: How much does Google care about your webpage?

Crawl Budget is very popular topic these days. The search engines are supposed to scan daily the highest possible number of sites, searching for the new content. During the crawling they are finding new URL addresses that need to be analyzed, indexed and included in search.For there are many of these addresses, the robots need to be limited so their excessive and fast crawling does not harm concrete servers. We call that crawl rate limit. Simultaneously, the robot has to take into consideration, how much he wants to crawl the web pages. We call that crawl demand, and it results from how many people want to access your website and how actual is the content.Google crawler, a GoogleBot must evaluate its wants and its cans. That creates crawl budget. Simply put, how much attention is Google giving to your web.

Why is crawl budget important for you?

Naturally, you want the search engines to keep revisiting your web pages and find as much of your URL addresses as possible to index them. The indexing is the result of content analysis or functionality of used links.You cannot directly influence the crawl budget, but you may use Google Search Console tool to monitor it. Apart from general statistics, you can also observe and fix server or crawl errors.Mind, however, that crawl budget is definitely not something to be afraid of, unless your website is having more than ca. 50 000 URL addresses. If you belong to the second group, today we are going to introduce you several tips, how optimize your crawl budget.

Optimize your crawl budget

Crawl budget of your website depends on the authority of your page, but also on how much it is being wasted. If your page is being shared a lot, GoogleBot will not cease to overlook it. More important, however, is to avoid some particular cases leading to wasting it. We are highlighting several of them to focus on:

Faceted navigation

Although the product parameters are important for your customers, if displayed in your URL, they may be harmful for the crawl budget in the end. Optimally, try to set just one URL address for each of your category or product.

“Obligatory” and duplicate content

Low-value-add URLs, such as map of the website, contacts, or even FAQ may be the reason for lowering your crawl budget or even ruining your website. The same goes for duplicate content. GoogleBot does not find the low-valuable content or the duplicates interesting and may cause the lowering of your crawl budget.

Error pages, redirections, or infinite spaces

Error pages, dead links, or even chained links (known as infinite spaces) are being exhaustive for the system. They may be even limited. You can control these easily by Google Search Console. As for the list of links linking to another list of links linking to another… Just avoid it.

Non-indexed web pages in the XML sitemap

If using XML sitemap, assure yourself that it is constantly synchronized with your web and all web pages are successfully indexed. If they are not, delete them. Thanks to this feature you will always have proper summary of the available content. For better overview, organize your sitemap in different segments.

Slowly loading web pages

Nobody likes to wait for a site to be loaded. The response time of your web page has to be short, preferably below 2 seconds. Otherwise, GoogleBot will spend too much time loading just one of your pages, not leaving any spare time for the others. Optimize your speed for both, web and mobile displays.

Actual content

As one of the variables works with the actuality of the content, assure yourself it is not stale, but constantly updated. The crawl budget is an immensely important feature from the SEO point of view. Obviously, the more crawled your webpage is, the higher traffic it gets. However, it does not mean that it will directly become highly ranked. That depends mainly on the content and customers, so always remember to make your customer prior to Google settings.

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About the Author: Martin Jančo

Account manager at BlueWinston & CCS Shopping in EU (I'm the guy responsible for the most effective PPC tool to create product text and Smart Shopping campaigns for Google Search)