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By Ruchi Pardal
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28 Nov, 2024
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~ 10 minutes to read
28 Nov, 2024
~ 10 minutes to read
Is your website fully optimized for ranking high on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP)? Think again! Maybe, your website needs a few changes in SEO approach to improve visibility and drive more organic traffic.
While SEO is a well-known strategy for improving rankings, crawl budget optimization is an often overlooked factor that can significantly help you improve SEO, ensuring search engines index your most important pages more efficiently.
But, what exactly is Crawl Budget Optimization and how does it help in enhancing SEO?
Let’s dive into the concept and explore how you can maximize your site’s potential in 2025!
A crawl budget refers to the allocation of resources by a search engine’s web crawler to discover, crawl, and index content on a website. It dictates how many pages or URLs a crawler can visit within a specific period, typically set by factors such as site structure, content freshness, and crawl accuracy.
The formula for the Crawl Budget is:
Crawl Budget= Crawl Rate + Crawl Demand
Crawl Budget works on two essential factors:
Crawl Rate Limit refers to the maximum number of requests a search engine bot Google Bot, can make to a site in a given time without overwhelming the server, often governed by the server’s performance and the site’s responsiveness.
For example:
If Googlebot visits your website 40 times a day, your Google Crawl budget would be 1,200 per month.
To calculate the monthly crawl budget based on daily visits, you simply multiply the number of daily visits by the number of days in a month.
Here’s the calculation:
So, the calculation is:
40 (daily visit) x 30 (days in a month)=1200 (monthly crawl budget)
Crawl demand represents the importance of a page or site to the search engine. High-value pages, such as those with fresh, unique, or popular content, tend to get crawled more frequently.
Crawl Budget optimization plays a critical role in SEO as it allows Google to find and crawl through web pages and then index them before they rank on the SERP. It directly impacts how quickly new content is discovered, how deep search engines can index your site, and how likely it is that all your valuable pages are indexed.
But remember:
If your website has more pages than the crawl budget allows, search engine crawlers may not crawl.
The reason is Google is very efficient in crawling websites and it prioritizes crawling pages that are most important for ranking, based on factors such as internal linking, page authority, and freshness of content.
Some of the important reasons why Crawl Budget is important for SEO include:
Search Engines like Google give a specific crawl budget to every website, which refers to the number of pages they can crawl in a period of time.
But, if your website has technical errors or your website is large with more than 10k+ webpages, Google might leave them unindexed. By managing the crawl budget properly, you ensure that search engines prioritize crawling your most important, high-quality pages.
A website’s Speed Index (SI) measures the speed at which a page’s content becomes visually visible as it loads.
For example: When you launch new content or pages on your website, search engines need to crawl and index them to appear in search results. If your crawl budget is used inefficiently, it could take a long time for these pages to be crawled and indexed.
Excessive crawling by search engine bots can overwhelm your server, leading to slow load times or downtime. By managing the crawl budget, you can limit the number of requests search engines make to your site, ensuring that it doesn’t overload your server.
If your crawl budget isn’t being fully utilized, or if the wrong pages are being crawled, this could indicate technical issues such as:
Google allocates a website’s crawl budget based on several factors to crawl the site without overloading the server. Key factors influencing crawl budget include:
Google prioritizes crawling pages based on their importance and the number of backlinks. High-authority websites or those with a lot of inbound links have maximum chances to get crawled by Google’s algorithm.
Googlebot evaluates your server’s response time. If the server is fast and responsive, it will crawl more pages. If the server is slow, overburdened, or returns errors (e.g., 5xx errors), Googlebot will reduce the crawl rate or delay crawls until performance improves.
The larger the website, the more pages Google needs to crawl. While Google can crawl billions of pages, it prioritizes content based on a crawl budget. Pages deeper in the structure or with less traffic may not be crawled as often unless they’re highly valuable.
For example:
if a site has 10,000 pages and Google allocates 100 pages per day, only the most important pages (like top products) will be crawled frequently, while deeper, less-visited pages may be crawled less often. The crawl rate adjusts based on-page value.
Optimizing your crawl budget is essential for ensuring search engines effectively index your website’s most important pages. Here are 10 best practices to help you maximize.
Improving your site speed is the best technique to allow Google to crawl through your web pages. It can be done by:
A well-organized internal linking structure helps search engines discover and prioritize your website’s key pages. Ensure every important page is linked from other relevant pages, and use descriptive anchor text for clarity.
Orphan pages are those with no internal links pointing to them, making it difficult for search engines to crawl them. These include issues such as broken links, internal links with nofollow attributes, and links with no anchor text.
A sitemap helps search engines explore your site more effectively. For example, XML sitemaps should be regularly updated to include new, modified, or deleted pages. This ensures that search engines maintain an accurate understanding of your site’s structure, enhancing crawl efficiency
Blocking unused or low-value URLs from being crawled helps focus the search engine’s crawl budget on your most important pages.
It’s better to use robots.txt or noindex meta tags to prevent crawlers from accessing pages like duplicates, login forms, or thank-you pages. This keeps your crawl budget from being wasted on irrelevant content.
Redicts slow down the crawling process by unnecessarily taking the bot from one URL to another. It happens usually when a site has many blockchains. Regularly audit your site for unnecessary redirects, particularly 301 redirects, and eliminate them instantly.
A sitemap helps search engines explore your site more effectively. For example, XML sitemaps should be regularly updated to include new, modified, or deleted pages.
To find broken links, go to the “Issues” tab in Site Audit, search for “broken,” and click the blue link under “# internal links are broken.” You will see a list of pages with broken links and details on each error.
Having similar pages on your website can lead to duplicated content confuse search engines and dilute the crawl budget, as bots may struggle to determine which version of a page to prioritize.
In the “Issues” tab of Site Audit, search for “duplicate” to check for duplicate content. To fix this, use “rel=canonical” tags to specify the preferred page or choose a main page and use 301 redirects for the duplicates.
The robots.txt file allows you to control which pages search engines can crawl and index. Be strategic by blocking low-value pages, such as admin areas, search results, or duplicate content, to save the crawl budget for important pages.
HTTP errors, such as 500 (server errors) or 403 (forbidden), can prevent search engines from accessing important pages, wasting the crawl budget.
Here are some of the common crawl budget optimization mistakes that might hinder you SEO rankings:
Overuse of robots.txt to block important pages can hinder crawlers from accessing key content, affecting your crawl budget efficiency.
Not reviewing Google Search Console crawl data can result in missed crawl inefficiencies, like over-crawling low-value pages, which wastes resources.
If your website relies too heavily on pagination, it may lead to unnecessary crawls of every page in the series, unnecessarily eating up the crawl budget.
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Ans: Tools like Google Search Console, SEMrush, and Ahrefs help identify crawl errors, monitor crawl activity, and manage crawl budget effectively, ensuring search engines index your site efficiently
Ans: Cost Budget can be calculated using the formula: Crawl Budget= Crawl Rate + Crawl Demand
Ans: Crawl efficiency measures how Googlebot crawls and indexes important pages on your website. It involves reducing wasted crawl budget on low-value or duplicate content and prioritizing high-value pages for faster indexing and better SEO performance.
Ans: To get better SEO rankings, you must optimize your cost budget as it helps search engines index more important pages quickly, improving your website’s SEO performance.
Ans: Update your sitemap whenever significant changes occur on your site, such as adding new content, changing URLs, or removing outdated pages. Regular updates ensure search engines are aware of your latest content for optimal crawling and indexing.
