Crawl budget is the number of web pages a search engine spends its resources crawling on your site in a specific period. It is influenced by two key factors.
This refers to how often search engines are interested in crawling the site. The crawling history of the site, as well as the content updates.
The crawl rate limit refers to the maximum number of requests that Googlebot is allowed to make to a site. It changes according to how the server works and search engines.
Why is Crawl Budget Important?
The crawl budget indicates how many site pages are crawled and indexed, and how often. Using your crawl budget efficiently helps ensure that your most important pages get indexed quickly while wasting fewer resources on unimportant or duplicate pages.
Websites with high page counts, frequently updated content, or technical restrictions should optimize their crawl budget to gain more visibility in the search results.
How to Optimize Crawl Budget?
- Make your website faster and improve server performance because a quicker response time encourages crawling of more pages.
- Improve site structure, relevant internal links signal the search engine which page is important.
- Cut Down on Redirects & Fix Broken Links – To help the bot crawl your site better, avoid needless redirects and errors (404).
- Block Crawlers for Nonessential Content – Minimize server load by using robots.txt and no index to restrict crawling of unimportant content.
- Submitting a Sitemap – These sitemaps will help in the efficient discovery and crawling of important pages.
- Use the Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console to follow crawl activity & fix issues at hand.
- Aim for high-quality, organic content on your website. Search engine crawlers love unique content that will benefit the website rankings.
When Should You Worry About Crawl Budget?
- Most small to medium-sized websites should not worry about the crawl budget. However, it becomes crucial for.
- Large websites with 1 million+ pages.
- Websites that frequently update their content (e.g., news sites, e-commerce stores).
- Websites that are marked “discovered, currently not indexed” in Google Search Console. Need to worry
FAQs.
How can I check my crawl budget?
Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report tells you how many requests Googlebot has made and when.
Does crawl-delay work with Googlebot?
No, Googlebot does not recognize the crawl-delay directive.
Can I increase my crawl budget?
While you cannot directly increase the crawl budget. The only action you can take is to improve your server performance, site structure, and internal linking.
Managing the crawl budget helps your valuable pages get indexed without getting ignored. In other words, it helps you get better visibility.
