Crawl Budget – what is it?

If you are working in the ecommerce field, you probably have met with the term Crawl Budget. In this article, we will explain what Crawl Budget is and how to optimize it.

As the first thing, let’s look at some definitions:

Without crawling, your content couldn’t be indexed and won’t appear in Google results.

Crawl budget is defined as the number of pages a crawler sets to crawl on a certain period of time. If you will run out of the budget, the web crawler will stop accessing your site’s content and pages and move on to other websites.

On every website the crawl budgets are different and your site’s crawl budget is established by Google.

Keep in mind, that crawling your site more often is not going to help you rank better per se. You do not need to worry about your crawl budget if your site has less than a few thousand URLs.

If you want to see the status of your crawl budget, you must go to Google Search Console. After picking your website, go to Crawl -> Crawl Stats. There you will see the number or pages that Google crawls per day.

In this case, the average crawl budget is 1,225 pages per day. If your website is small, your crawl budget will be smaller. If you will optimize your pages, you can achieve an even higher crawl budget.

There are different factors that can affect the Crawl Budget. If you want the best results, you should probably check on them.

• Server and Hosting – Keep in mind that you want as much stable website as possible. If you have some problems with your hosting, this can crash crawl constantly.
• Duplicated Content – Be really careful what you publish. If Google detects duplication, it can be a big issue as it does not provide value to Google users.
• Spam and low-quality content – The crawler can lower your budget if it sees that you are posting all the time and the quality is low or spam.
• Rendering – Your website and hosting should be fast enough. If your pages are being loaded for too long, the crawler can stop rendering and indexing your pages.

There are at least a few things you can do to optimize your crawl budget. Keep in mind that the crawl budget optimization is more important for bigger sites.

1. Prioritize pages to Crawl – If your site is big you probably use Google Analytics and Search Console. Here, you can filter your pages that have the most clicks. Pages that generate clicks and revenue should be easily accessible for crawlers.
2. Find out how much resources can your hosting allocate – You can download your server log files and use one of the tools (SEMrush Log File Analyzer, OnCrawl Log Analyzer or any other) to find out how your current server setup is impacted by Googlebot.
3. Optimize your pages – Keep in mind that you need to have your pages optimized for any Google user that visits your site. Keep it simple and clean, use correctly H1, H2, H3 and invest some time in SEO (search engine optimization).