When it comes to SEO there are many factors you need to consider. Most popular SEO factors according to webmasters are keywords, backlinks, content quality, etc. Everyone wants to bring their content to the top of search engine result. The term SEO is very important to interact with the search engine and webmasters invest more time to make it happen.
Other than the above-mentioned factors there are many more when it comes to search engine optimization. Crawl budget is one among them. By knowing more about crawl budget, you can use some techniques to make search engine crawl your website. It will also help to bring your content to the top of SERP. Before you know more about optimizing crawling budget you need to know the actual definition of the term
What is a Crawl Budget?
Crawl budget is a buzzword to many people in the content marketing industry. If you are new to this term here is the definition for it.
Crawl budget is nothing but some concepts and system that Google follow to decide the number of pages to be crawled and which are contents to be indexed while crawling a website.
Crawl budget depends on two factors such as crawl rate limit and crawl demand. The crawl rate limit is the limit that Google bots make to control the crawling of your website. It can help to avoid overloading your website and will also help to make the website load faster. If there is no demand for crawling, Googlebot activity will be lower.
Considering both crawl rate limit and crawl demand Google decides the number of URLs be crawled. This is known as crawling budget. We can prioritize what to be crawled and when to do it by defining the crawl budget.
Why Crawl Budget Matter for SEO?
Crawl budget is very important to consider if you want to improve your SEO. By defining the number of pages to be crawled at the right time can help the Google web crawler from overloading the website with multiple instructions. This can affect the page loading speed.
Google users always want to visit pages that can load faster. Most users won’t wait for more than 3 sec to load a website. Google can easily index a small website with limited pages. But there are some conditions where indexing can be difficult to perform such as
- Indexing a big website with more than 10K pages
- If you are adding some additional webpages to your website and have to check crawl budget
- Avoid duplicate pages
- Adding redirects and direct chains can consume more crawling budget than you expect.
- Outdated contents cannot help your website to rank higher. A frequent update can bring your website more visibility
- Try to avoid duplicate meta title and tags. It can ruin your website credibility
- Make your website load faster. Nobody will like to visit a website with slow loading speed.
You can avoid such situations by following some best practices which we will discuss further.
Google Crawl Budget for SEO?
According to Google, the Crawl budget is something they introduced for a larger website. They need to prioritize what to crawl, when and how much resources the site can allocate to crawl a website is very useful for a larger website. Here is what we can understand from the term
- The crawl rate limit is designed to avoid too much crawling which can affect the server
- Crawl demand decides how much Google want to crawl your contents based on content popularity. Google wants to keep indexing up to date. So, from crawl demand, it will analyze the stale contents in its indexing list.
- By taking both the limits into consideration Google bot designs the crawl budget for your website. It defines the number of URLs to be crawled while indexing your website.
- You will get a clear idea about the term by knowing how it works. We can now discuss the workflow of crawl budget for Google.
- Google first crawl into a website and check the robots.txt file and reject the prohibited URLs
- After getting a robots.txt file that is not prohibited, the next step is to check them against follow and patterns. It will only follow the URLs with matching patterns and reject the others
- If it matches then check the new URL with do not crawl URL patterns
- If the URL is not matching then it will get added to the crawl queue. Now the crawling ends and the search engine continues crawling by fetching another URL.
How to Optimize your Crawl Budget?
To make your website more visible to search engine users first get it indexed by Google. Otherwise, no one can see your website or its contents. Follow the tips below and optimize your website by considering crawl budget
1. Use a proper tool:
If you are not aware of finding the crawl budget then one thing you can do is to use proper tools that can help you to find it. Google search console and Bing Webmasters tools are the two popular tools that can help you for this purpose. Try using it and see how you can avoid issues that can consume your website’s crawl budget and make it easy for search engine spiders to crawl.
2. Make your website easily crawlable:
You can make your website crawlable by following some simple steps. A crawlable website is nothing but a website with links that can be followed easily by search engine spiders. To do that you can set up robots.txt file and .htaccess to avoid your site getting blocked while crawling. You cannot block the site getting crawled by simply disallowing it. By using non-index meta tag and X- Robot-Tag you can set up if the pages that need not be crawled by Google bots.
3. Avoid redirect chains:
When the number of redirects increases, the crawl budget is decreasing. If your website has a long chain of redirects then Google bots won’t reach the destination. It will break before reaching the endpoint. So, the page won’t get indexed and cannot appear in search result also. It is better to avoid redirects with long chains as it can damage your website contents. You can include a maximum of 2 redirects, not more.
4. Rich media files are useful:
Long back Google bot was not designed to crawl websites with various types of content such as JavaScript, Flash, HTML. Now it is changing. You can include any type of media files that can bring more value to your website while ranking.
5. Avoid broken links:
You may want to improve user experience to make your website more acceptable to search engine and users. To achieve it one thing you can do is to avoid broken links in your website. Google won’t support website that cannot offer better service to its users. Broken links cannot bring any value to your contents and it should be avoided from your website to improve your crawl budget.
6. Use parameters while using dynamic URL:
Google treats dynamic URLs that is set to lead to the ahem page as a separate page and it can affect your website’s crawl budget. To avoid this situation, you can go to Google search console and set parameters. It can help to identify search engine crawlers that the dynamic URL represents the same page.
7. Concentrate on your site map:
Site maps can help to make your pages organized and search engine crawlers can easily identify pages while indexing it. Make your site up to date and remove any broken links, redirects, blocked pages, etc. there are tools available for you to do this. Use tools like site auditor and make your site map well organized for search engines.
Tips to Optimize Crawl Budget for SEO?
By optimizing crawl budget, you can make sure to not waste your website’s crawl budget for any reason. For many people, this could be a new term. But everyone who runs their own website should know about its importance to make their website successful.
You don’t have to be a techie to know all these important factors. Anyone with some knowledge of running their website can optimize their crawl budget and make the crawling easy. As I said above if Google misses crawling any of your websites it can affect your website ranking. No one will see those contents in the search result if it is not indexed. Here are some tips you can follow to optimize your website’s crawl budget.
Make URLs accessible:
You can use parameters to make your URL more specific to help your website visitors. Google value sites which can provide better user experience and as a part of this you can try to make the URL easily accessible to these website crawlers. It can help them to crawl website easily without wasting much time and also saves your website’s crawl budget.
Check for content quality:
Content quality is very important to consider for SEO. Low-quality content cannot bring any value to your website. So, avoid low-quality contents all the time.
Check the loading speed of your website:
It is always better to make sure that all your website contents load very fast. Users won’t wait more than 3sec to load a website. It will also consume most of your crawling budget. If your website takes more time to load then it gives a bad sign your website. It also means that your website cannot handle more request and hence it may have to adjust the crawl limit accordingly.
Set up your internal links properly:
You need to set up internal links properly because if you have not arranged those links properly there is a chance to miss some of the pages. Google may not crawl all your internal links properly and might not get it indexed. It can affect your website ranking also. So, arrange all your internal links well.
Avoid duplicate contents:
It is better to check your website for duplicate contents. If there are duplicate contents it may take more time to crawl those additional pages and may consume more of your website’s crawl limit.
Keep everything fresh:
Google supports fresh contents and if you don’t want to waste crawl budget then it is better to concentrate on updating website contents. You can add fresh content or modify the existing contents to keep your website updated.
Clean up URLs:
Clean up URL in the sense you can avoid including low-quality URLs in your website. To do that you can check if there are any broken pages on your website. Try to avoid such pages, and also duplicate pages can also be avoided. Also, try to avoid infinite spaces in your links to avoid consuming more crawl limit.
Adding filters:
If you want to prevent robots.txt from crawling to all parts of a website then it is the best idea to block those parts of a website you don’t want the search engine to crawl. It can also help to save some crawl budget of your website easily.
Conclusion:
If you are new to the term crawl budget then this article will help you to get a clear idea about the term. Every webmaster should be aware of their websites crawl budget to make it more organized. It can also help the search engine to crawl your website easily. So, you can concentrate on setting your crawl budget within the limit to make your website quality better.
Google wants to provide better contents to its users. When a website gives that type of contents then Google will reward such websites. We cannot say that crawling budget directly impacts your website SEO. But it has some indirect impact on your SEO and website ranking. Try to optimize your crawl budget using the technique explained above and let us know your experience. You can also write tips for our audience that can help them to optimize their website’s crawl budget.