Everything you need to know about Crawl Budget

Understanding a crawl budget can help with SEO efforts on your website. A crawl budget is the number of pages that a Googlebot will crawl and index on a website within a certain amount of time. Without these crawl bots, Google can’t index your website which means that you won’t rank for anything. 

Most sites don’t have to worry about their crawl budget but some cases may require you to learn how your crawl budget works. If you have an eCommerce website, then chances are your website has over 10,000 pages. If you have lots of redirects, you could also face your crawl budget being eaten up in the redirect chain. Another thing to be aware of is if you’ve added pages. You’ll want to ensure you have enough crawl budget to get them indexed swiftly. 

Have you ever wondered why some websites seem to effortlessly climb to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) while others struggle to gain even a sliver of visibility? The answer, in part, lies in a concept known as crawl budget. This crucial element of SEO determines how much attention search engines devote to a website, ultimately influencing its ranking and organic traffic.

Imagine a search engine like a giant library with countless bookshelves. Its crawlers, or “librarians,” tirelessly explore the web, indexing and categorizing content. However, their time is limited. Crawl budget dictates how many pages on your website these crawlers can visit and analyze within a given timeframe.

The more efficiently you manage your crawl budget, the more attention your valuable pages receive, leading to better search engine rankings and increased website traffic. So, if you’re serious about SEO success, understanding and optimizing your crawl budget is essential.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll demystify the concept of crawl budget, delve into its impact on SEO, and equip you with practical strategies to maximize its efficiency. Get ready to unlock your website’s full potential and dominate the SERPs!

What is a Crawl Budget? 

A crawl budget is the number of pages that a bot is able to crawl and index in a certain time frame. Once, your crawl budget runs out, the crawler will stop accessing your site’s content and move onto other sites. 

A crawl budget is established by Google and the allocation depends on a number of factors including the size of the site. Larger sites will require bigger crawl budgets as they have more pages to cover. 

If you update content often, Google takes this into consideration and prioritises content that is being updated regularly. A site’s performance and load times can correlate with your crawl budget as well. It also takes into account your linking structure and how many dead links are on your site.

Crawl budget refers to the volume of pages search engine bots can request from a website during a given period. Think of it like a spending budget – search engines allot a certain crawling capacity to each site.

Google and other engines use complex algorithms to optimize their crawling. They analyze factors like site content, structure, past performance to allocate budget.

Why Crawl Budget Matters

Your crawl budget impacts how fast pages get indexed, processed and ranked. Pages showing content searchers want will only appear for relevant queries if crawled frequently enough.

If your site’s crawl budget is maxed out, new or updated pages may get crawled less often. This slowdown means missed opportunities for traffic and conversions.

Monitoring crawl budget helps troubleshoot drops in rankings and impressions. Optimizing it results in faster indexing of priority content. Delivering value to searchers starts with getting discoverable – and crawl budget facilitates that.

How Crawl Budget Works

Google is extremely well versed at crawling sites, so there isn’t too much to panic around if you have a normal-sized site. If you have less than a thousand URLs, then you are guaranteed that Google won’t encounter an issue crawling your site. 

To ensure that your site can cope with crawlers, Google also creates a limit on how often it can visit a site, depending on what it can physically sustain. The bot will push a site’s server to see how it responds and then will lower or raise the limit of the crawl budget depending on the response. 

This is achieved by crawl bots visiting your site on their own but they may also visit your site based on the instructions provided within your site map. 

Once you create your site map you can tell bots how often they should crawl certain sections or individual pages within your site. The industry standard is shown below.

• Core content like your home page, service pages, contact us pages can be crawled once per month.
• Blog/News Content can be crawled once per week.

This standard is set like this because your core content is not likely to change very often and therefore does not need to be crawled that often either. Your blog and news related content is what you create more regularly and therefore you can ask bots to crawl it more regularly so it can be indexed.

Once the bots visit your site they will crawl your content as normal and then follow the links to other pages on your website. This is how a search engine develops a deeper understanding of your site as a whole and is also why internal links are so important.

To see how often a google bot or any bot for that matter crawls your site you can view your servers log file. This shows you similar data to an analytics platform but it is less user friendly and can sometimes be hard to understand.

How to view crawl stats in Google Search Console and set up crawl rate alerts:

Monitoring Crawl Budget in Search Console

Google Search Console provides great visibility into your site’s crawl budget and activity.

Navigate to the “Coverage” report and select “Crawl stats” to view metrics like:

• Pages crawled per day
• Average crawl rate
• Pages indexed
• Pages with issues flagged

You can filter by date range to analyze trends over time. Key things to watch for:

• Sudden changes in pages crawled per day
• Major variances between URLs crawled vs. indexed
• Crawl rate decreases

These anomalies signal potential crawl budget issues.

Set Up Alerts

Enable email notifications in Search Console to proactively detect drops in key crawl stats like:

• Page index rate below 50 pages a day
• Crawl rate drops below 15 pages per minute
• Indexing issues affect over 100 pages

Customize thresholds aligned to historical baselines. Receiving alerts empowers you to promptly investigate and remedy emerging crawl budget limitations.

How to Optimise for Crawl Budget

Optimising your crawl budget ensures that Googlebot crawlers are indexing valuable content and pages that will prioritise your website when using SERPs. 

Optimise Pages

As mentioned before, your sitemap is a direct link between how a bot may wish to crawl your site. This gives you some control over the crawl process and helps you direct the bots towards valuable content on your site that you may wish to optimise as part of an SEO strategy. 

Updating Content

Search engines like sites that provide relevant content that is fresh and up to date for its users. You may be able to increase the allocated crawl budget given to your site by updating your content regularly and relevantly.

Doing this means search engines will need to crawl your site more often to provide more relevant search results within their index, but they will also attribute more valuable search queries to your site as well.

Fix Internal Link Problems 

As mentioned before, internal linking is very important for on-page SEO. When it comes to the crawl budget we need to make sure our internal links work properly to get the most out of our crawl budget once a bot arrives.

• Broken Links – When links are broken they stop bots from crawling your website further and can hinder a search engines ability to properly understand your site. This can also affect the keywords your site can become visible for.
• Redirect Chains – This is a series of redirections a bot needs to go through before it reaches the end URL. As a bot goes from link to link it is using up it’s crawl budget. This means there may not be much left to crawl the final URL once it has arrived. This can occur if you are constantly deleting content and redirecting it to other pages.
• Link Loops – This is a similar issue to redirect chains but in this case the internal links within your content is linking back to itself from other articles and vice versa. 

This results in google bots getting stuck in the loop with nowhere to go which means they cannot crawl further into your site. This can happen accidentally but in some cases it was a black hat SEO tactic many years ago.

Avoid Having Orphan Pages

Orphan pages are pages on your site that are not connected to your site map or linked to in any way. Therefore they are very difficult for search engines to index because they struggle to find them on your site. There is no path or access route for them to follow. 

In some cases orphaned pages are ok to have depending on the circumstances but more often than not they are the result of a small mistake while publishing content on your site.

A good example of when it’s ok to have an orphan page is when you are holding a very brief one off promotion. In this case the URL is likely being shared through various marketing channels and a landing page is required for potential customers to sign up to your service or buy your product. It’s important to remember though that once the promotion is finished the page must be deleted. 

Keep Duplicate Content to a Minimum 

It’s simple. Search engines want to crawl the most unique and relevant content available. If your site has a large amount of duplicated content the search engine may not consider your site worthy of it’s crawl budget in future. This risks your valuable content not getting crawled enough in the future and as a result it can have a negative impact on your rankings and keyword visibility.

Creating valuable and unique content can ensure that Google continues to index your pages. 

Maintaining your site and keeping an eye out for spam content can also help Google bots index your content quicker and more efficiently as they avoid the sites that appear spammy.

Key Takeaways for Your Crawl Budget

Understanding what a crawl budget is and how it can affect your website’s SEO is very important. It allows you to make sure your content is working as well as it can to provide your site with as much organic traffic as possible.

• Improve your site’s speed to allow the Googlebot to crawl more of your site’s URLs. Not only are you improving user experience but you’re allowing the bot to crawl faster. 
• Use internal links as Google prioritises pages that have external and internal links pointing to them. Internal links send bots to all the different pages on your site that you want it to crawl. 
• Ensure your website has a flat website architecture as this sets up all your site’s pages to have link authority flowing to them. 
• Google doesn’t like to waste resources by indexing multiple pages with the same content, so make sure that you limit duplicate content on your site. 
• Lastly, Google struggles to find orphan pages, so make sure there is an internal or external link pointing to each page on your site. 

Actionable tips to optimize a website’s crawl budget:

Fix Technical Barriers

• Improve site speed and resolve server errors blocking bots, like 500 or 503 codes
• Enable rendering of site maps and structured data to aid crawling
• Switch to responsive mobile-friendly design so fewer resources wasted crawling duplicate content

Enhance Internal Linking

• Interlink related content across internal pages allowing bots to better crawl interconnected clusters
• Ensure links have contextual anchor text and tags to highlight relevancy

Remove Low-Value Pages

• Audit low-traffic pages that distract from core content, redirecting bots from priority URLs
• 301 redirect abandoned blogs or legacy dot com domains to consolidate equity
• No-index pages like sign-in that offer no SEO value

Produce Higher-Quality Content Prioritize pages that answer searcher queries and attract backlinks. Unique, regularly updated blogs, tools and research resources command prime real estate in earning crawl budget allocation.

Optimizing technical infrastructure paired with enhancing content quality and authority moves the needle on earning a larger crawl allowance from Google.

SEO expert on advanced crawl budget strategies:

I spoke with Robert Sullivan, an SEO consultant with over 15 years experience advising enterprises on optimizing search visibility. He shared insightful crawl budget management tactics.

Q: What’s your top tip for websites struggling with slow crawl rates?

Robert: “Analyze the site architecture and pruning opportunities. Often excessive ad pages or overblown product catalogs drag down the budget. Consolidate this ancillary content through noindex tags or deleting entirely. Doubling down on cornerstone landing pages and blogs boosts visibility of premium assets.”

Q: Any clever tricks to earn more budget allocation from Google?

Robert: “Creating a news section updated daily with scoops in your industry tells search engines this site offers fresh value. Consider weekly podcasts, research papers or interactive tools as well. TheseSIGNAL freshness and subject matter authority. Google rewards sites making an impact with more crawl budget.”

Q: For resource-intensive sites like ecommerce, how handle scale challenges?

Robert: “Paginate catalog pages displaying thousands of SKUs. Duplicate product descriptions strain the budget with marginal gains. Use sort and filter rather than endless indexed pages. Also leverage site maps and schema markup to help Google crawl smarter.”

Expert perspectives like Robert’s reveal actionable tactics beyond the basics – from pruning to freshness signals and technical enhancements.

Additional interview with an SEO expert providing advanced crawl budget strategies:

I spoke to Amanda Collins, an enterprise-level technical SEO with over 10 years optimizing huge ecommerce sites. She shared advanced insights on maximizing large crawl budgets.

Q: What technical architecture advice for organizations managing tens of millions of pages?

Amanda: “Utilize subdomains over folders at scale to allow granular crawl budget allocation. Assign higher budget quotas to subdomains with revenue-driving content. Enable XML sitemaps indexed solely to those project subdomains. Every ounce of bandwidth counts.”

Q: Any tips for managing seasonal inventory fluctuations or sales?

Amanda: “Set up dedicated product listing pages that dynamically pull latest SKUs rather than pre-building static pages. No need to crawl obsolete inventory. Use schema markup on these listing pages to aid search bots in comprehending the templates.”

Q: What’s your single most important crawl budget recommendation?

Amanda: “Obsess over site speed. Faster sites earn higher crawling allowance and indexation priority. Tackle page bloat, minimize HTTP requests, compress images. Optimize code and upgrade infrastructure. Velocity bolsters both SEO visibility and user experience – that’s a coveted win-win.”

Hope these high-level insights on engineering, content and speed help showcase smart tactics to scale crawl budget management!

FAQs

Still have questions? Check out common crawl budget queries below.

Q: How is crawl budget calculated?

A: Proprietary algorithms weighing factors like site quality, structure, past crawl stats. No public formulas shared.

Q: Can I increase my site’s crawl budget?

A: Yes, by earning trust signals through great content, speed, authority building. But quotas still within Google’s control.

Q: Does crawl budget impact rankings?

A: Indirectly. Limited crawling throttles content eligibility to rank for queries. Optimizing budget facilitates more page indexation.

Q: What’s a reasonable crawl rate target?

A: Varies greatly by site size and vertical, but 10+ pages per second a good baseline for typical SMB websites.

Q: Should I worry about Bing or other engine crawl budgets?

A: Focus crawl budget efforts on Google for maximum ROI as it drives majority of search market share.

Conclusion

Crawl budget is a crucial yet often neglected factor in unlocking a website’s search visibility potential. Monitor site crawl statistics routinely via platforms like Search Console. Diagnose and resolve technical barriers hampering bots. Double down on powerhouse landing pages over spammy peripheral content.

Elevate site speed and authority signals to earn more crawl budget allocation over time. Use this foundational blueprint to graduate from crawl frustration to high-performance discoverability.