Crawl Budget 101: What is a crawl budget and how to improve it

The crawl budget is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization, but it’s often misunderstood and poorly implemented. This guide will teach you what it means to have a crawl budget, how to figure out how much you need, and how to allocate your resources effectively so that your website can be crawled faster without sacrificing quality.

You’ll learn both basic techniques as well as advanced tips and tricks that will help you build a better website that ranks higher in search engines!

What is a crawl budget?

A crawl budget refers to how often, and for how long, your website crawlers will execute their jobs. One of those jobs is called crawling.

A crawl job starts with a crawler reading your site’s robots.txt file (or sitemap if you have one) to figure out what content it should find on your website. Then it follows links from page to page until it has traversed all of your site’s pages.

The more links there are, and/or the longer they are, then that means more time needed to complete a crawl job. The shorter or fewer in number your links are, then that means less time needed to complete a crawl job.

You might ask yourself why we want our crawlers to be efficient? There’s two reasons:

1. If your crawlers take too much time to crawl through your website, then search engines may not index as many of your new webpages as quickly as possible;
2. If your crawlers take too much time to crawl through your website, then you may get charged by Google for each second they spend crawling through your site—and that can add up very quickly!

Why do we need to optimize our crawl budget?

Because search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! continually crawl billions of web pages every day, optimizing our site’s crawl budget can have a tremendous impact on your website’s traffic—and results.

The more often Google can crawl your site, for example, the more information it has about your content and indexing status. In turn, that means you’ll be ranked higher in its search engine results pages (SERPs).

So if you optimize your site with these tips in mind, you could see higher rankings across all three major search engines.

What factors affect crawl budget optimization?

Every website has a crawl budget. This term refers to how many resources are available for crawling, which in turn determines how often Google can update its index with new content from your site.

When it comes time for you to consider whether or not your crawl budget is optimized, you have a few different factors that you need to look at. Let’s take a look at them now.

First, there’s the number of pages on your site. The more pages you have on a given domain, the less likely it is that every page will be updated by Google every single time it crawls.

This means that if you have 2,000 pages on your site and Google has a crawl budget of 50 pages per day, then it might take up to two months for all 2,000 of those pages to get crawled.

Second, there’s how many URLs are linking into each individual page. If you have only one URL pointing at a given page, then there’s not much chance that Google will crawl it as frequently as another page with 10 links pointing at it.

Finally, there’s how often you update or add new content to your website. If you don’t update very often, then chances are good that Google won’t visit your website very often either.

How to optimize crawl budget?

Everyone wants his website to be at the top of Google’s search results. However, there’s only one problem – that most websites are not optimized for crawlers. The result is slow indexing, which leads to reduced crawl budget for your site.

The idea behind crawl budget was simple: webmaster would request certain number of pages per month, and Google would process those pages accordingly. At some point, they introduced robots.txt exclusion rules, so that pages can be excluded from crawling by default.

Then came page priority signals, which allowed webmasters to tell Google what kind of content should be crawled first.

For example, if a page has noindex meta tag or nofollow attribute on links pointing to it, then such page should have lower priority than other pages with index meta tag or nofollow attributes on links pointing to them.

In order to get more out of your crawl budget and improve your position in SERPs, try implementing these strategies into your SEO strategy:

1. Create sitemaps – Google gives extra points to sites using sitemaps, because such sites give clear picture of their structure to search engine spiders.
2. Exclude low-quality pages from crawling – do you really want a few badly written articles to hurt your overall reputation? Excluding low-quality content ensures that poor-quality pages don’t affect your overall quality score.
3. Use canonical URLs – canonical URLs allow you to consolidate multiple versions of same content under single URL. This makes it easier for search engines to find your site and identify its structure.
4. Use structured data markup – structured data markup allows you to provide information about different parts of your website (e.g., products) directly on that page, without having to create separate pages for each product individually.
5. Use hreflang tags – hreflang tags allow you to tell search engines which language version of page should be shown to users from specific countries. Let’s say, English-speaking users from US will see English version of your site while Spanish speaking users from Spain will see Spanish version.
6. Make sure all important pages are crawlable – use robots.txt file to make sure that your site doesn’t contain any dead links, internal 404 errors etc..
7. Make sure you don’t use too many redirects – too many redirects means less time spent on processing your site by search engine bots.
8. Fix broken links – broken link building used to be very popular among SEO professionals back in early 2000s when link popularity mattered a lot for ranking well in SERPs.
9. Optimize your site for speed – search engines will spend less time on your site if it loads fast.
10. Use HTTPS – Google announced that HTTPS/SSL-secured sites will rank higher in SERPs. While this might not be a direct ranking factor, it does help to build trust between you and your visitors.
11. Avoid cloaking – loaking is the practice of showing different content to humans and search engine bots.
12. Use robots.txt exclusions wisely – it’s always better to include pages in your site map, but if you want to exclude a page from indexing, do it wisely.
13. Use canonicals – canonicals are useful for consolidating duplicate content and improving crawl budget.
14. Use rel=next and rel=prev links – these links tell search engines which pages should be processed next and previous to the current page.
15. Use pagination – pagination is a great way to prevent search engines from indexing your entire site in a single crawl
16. Use sitemaps – if you don’t want to submit your site to Google Webmaster Tools, you can still submit a sitemap.
17. Use 301 redirects – 301 (permanent) redirects are the best way to deal with duplicate content issues.
18. Use canonical URLs – use canonical URLs to tell search engines which page is the original version of your content.