Crawl Budget: Understand How To Manage & Optimize Your Budget

Managing your website’s crawl budget is a crucial aspect of SEO that can significantly impact how well your site is indexed by search engines. A crawl budget refers to the number of pages a search engine like Google will crawl on your site within a given period of time. Optimizing this budget ensures that search engines prioritize your most valuable content, improving your visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) and driving more organic traffic to your site.

What Is Crawling

Crawling is the process used by search engines to discover new and updated content on the web. Search engines use algorithms nicknamed bots - also known as crawlers or spiders - to navigate through the internet. During this navigation, they follow links from one page to another, indexing content along the way. Crawlers analyze the content, HTML, and other elements of each page to understand what it’s about and determine its relevance for various search queries. Making it easy for crawlers to crawl your content is the first step in ensuring that your web pages appear in search engine results.

What Is a Crawl Budget

A crawl budget is the number of pages that a search engine will crawl on your website within a specific period. This budget is influenced by factors such as the popularity of your pages, the freshness of your content, and the overall health of your site. A well-managed crawl budget ensures that search engines focus on the most important pages of your site, such as those with high-quality content or those that are frequently updated. This prevents less valuable pages from consuming too much of the crawl budget, which improves the overall efficiency of your site’s indexation.

Why Is Your Crawl Budget Important In SEO?

Your crawl budget is important in SEO because it determines how often and how thoroughly search engines will index your site. If search engines cannot crawl and index all your important pages often enough, those pages may not appear in search results. If your most important content doesn't even appear in search results, you'll lose valuable opportunities for visibility and traffic. Also, an optimized crawl budget helps prevent search engines from wasting resources on low-priority or duplicate pages, ensuring that your most valuable content is always visible and accessible to users.

Maximizing crawl budget and resolving indexation issues is an important aspect of technical SEO.

Understanding Crawl Capacity Limit

The crawl capacity limit is the maximum number of requests a search engine will make to your site without overloading your server. This limit is determined by factors such as your server’s performance, the response time of your pages, and the number of errors encountered during previous crawls. If your server is slow or returns a high number of errors, search engines may reduce the crawl rate to avoid impacting the site's performance, potentially reducing the number of pages crawled and indexed.

Understanding Crawl Demand

Crawl demand refers to how much interest a search engine has in crawling your website. This demand is based on the popularity of your pages and how frequently they change. Pages that are frequently updated or attract a lot of traffic will generally have a higher crawl demand. Search engines prioritize crawling these high-demand pages to ensure their index is up-to-date with the latest content. Understanding crawl demand helps you identify which pages should be optimized and regularly updated to maintain high crawl demand.

Best Practices For Optimizing Your Website's Crawling & Indexing Potential

To maximize your website’s crawling and indexing potential, follow these best practices:

Logical URL Structure

A logical URL structure helps both users and search engines understand the content and hierarchy of your website. Ensure your URLs are clean, descriptive, and reflect the structure of your site. Avoid using complex strings, session IDs, or unnecessary parameters. A well-organized URL structure makes it easier for search engine crawlers to navigate and index your site effectively, improving your crawl budget allocation.

Some people swear by flat URL structures, and others swear by properly optimized hierarchic URL structures. Which structure is best depends on the goals and purpose of your website. If you are able to maintain and manage a hierarchic URL structure, they can by far be more informative and helpful for both users and crawlers, but they are harder to optimize and rank because of the way link equity is passed.

Use Canonical Tags

Canonical tags are HTML elements that help prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the "canonical" or preferred version of a webpage when multiple URLs have similar or identical content. By using canonical tags, you direct search engines to the most authoritative version of your content, consolidating link equity and avoiding wasted crawl budget on duplicate pages. In addition to conserving crawl budget, you also avoid Google identifying the wrong page as the version that will be indexed and shown to users. Being intentional with the use of canonical tags can ensure that you take control of which pages are recognized as primary.

Use Noindex Tags When Relevant

Noindex tags instruct search engines not to index certain pages, such as those with thin content, duplicate content, or pages not intended for the public (e.g., internal search results pages). Using noindex tags strategically helps focus your crawl budget on the most valuable content, ensuring that search engines prioritize the pages you want to rank.

Paginated pages are a good example of pages you'd want to add noindex tags to. In most cases if you have paginated pages, you aren't trying to rank for anything with these pages, but there can end up being dozens of these pages which will take away from your overall budget.

Implement Schema Structured Data

Schema markup, also known as structured data, is a type of microdata that helps search engines understand the content of your pages more accurately. Implementing schema markup can enhance your website’s indexation by providing search engines with detailed information about your content, which can lead to rich snippets in search results and improve click-through rates.

Using schema markup you can convey things like the purpose of the page, the services offered by the business, the type of product offered, any reviews, various business information (office hours, phone numbers, etc.) and if your page is deemed relevant enough for the given query, the additional information will help Google enrich your search result to include the parts of this data most relevant to the user. They'll see things like reviews, your phone number, your address, any relevant product information, etc.

Resolve Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can dilute the effectiveness of your crawl budget by causing search engines to spend resources indexing multiple versions of the same page. In addition, duplicate content can prevent certain pages from indexing to begin with, so it is important to ensure duplicate content is avoided.

To resolve duplicate content issues, use canonical tags, noindex tags, or 301 redirects to consolidate similar pages. This ensures that search engines focus on indexing your most important pages and do not waste crawl budget on redundant content.

Fix 404 Errors

404 errors occur when a page cannot be found on your site. These errors can disrupt the crawling process and negatively impact your crawl budget, as search engines may repeatedly attempt to access these non-existent pages. Regularly monitor your site for 404 errors using tools like Google Search Console or Ahrefs to fix or redirect broken links to ensure a smooth crawling process.

Submit Updated Sitemaps

Submitting an XML sitemap to Google Search Console and other search engines provides a roadmap of your website’s structure, making it easier for crawlers to find and index your important pages. Ensure that your sitemap is always up-to-date, especially after adding new content or making significant changes to your site. Regularly submitting updated sitemaps helps improve the efficiency of the crawling process.

When you do submit your sitemaps, try to ensure that you aren't submitting sitemaps multiple times a day if they haven't changed. If you submit a sitemap multiple times a day and it hasn't changed it can take away from your crawl budget.

Avoid Orphan Pages

Orphan pages are pages on your site that are not linked to by any other page. These pages can be overlooked by search engines during the crawling process because there are no links pointing to them. To avoid orphan pages, ensure that all your important pages are linked from other pages within your site, preferably from high-authority or frequently crawled pages. This will help search engines discover and index these pages.

Improve Page Speed

Page speed is a critical factor for both user experience and SEO. Slow-loading pages can hinder crawlers from fully indexing your site, leading to incomplete or inefficient indexing. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify and address performance issues. Improving your page speed will not only enhance user experience but also ensure that search engine crawlers can efficiently navigate your site.

Ensure Pagination Best-Practices

Ensure that you avoid using many numbered links to paginated pages (like "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", etc.). Using internal links like these will impact your crawl budget. Utilize pagination best practices to ensure you optimize your crawl budget, maximize user-experience, and improve your ranking potential.

How These Steps Will Improve Your Crawlability

By implementing these best practices, you improve your site's crawlability, ensuring that search engines can efficiently discover, index, and rank your content. A well-optimized crawl budget leads to better visibility in search results, higher traffic, and improved SEO performance overall.

Monitoring Your Crawl Activity Using The Search Console

Google Search Console is a valuable tool for monitoring your site’s crawl activity. It provides insights into how Google crawls and indexes your site, including information on crawl errors, the number of pages crawled per day, and the time spent downloading pages. Regularly reviewing this data can help you identify and fix any crawl-related issues, optimize your crawl budget, and ensure that your site remains accessible to search engines.

How Managing Crawl Budget Improves Website Indexation

Effectively managing your crawl budget ensures that search engines can index your most valuable pages, improving your website’s overall indexation. By focusing crawl efforts on high-quality content, fixing errors, and implementing SEO best practices, you make it easier for search engines to understand and rank your site. Better indexation leads to improved visibility in search results, more organic traffic, and a stronger online presence.