Why Does Your Business Need a Solid Crawl Budget? 10/10

A lot goes into ensuring that your website is properly crawled and indexed by Google. One of the most critical factors is your crawl budget—the number of resources (e.g., pages, bandwidth, etc.) you allocate to Googlebot crawling and indexing your website. Keep reading to learn more about what a crawl budget is and what you can do to optimize it.

What is a crawl budget?

When it comes to SEO, a crawl budget is one of the most important concepts to understand and have in place. A crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot can crawl on your website daily. The crawl budget is based on the website’s size, traffic metrics, and page load speed.

You’ll want to set a crawl budget that is high enough to cover all the necessary pages on the website while staying within the recommended limits of the server. If the crawl budget is too low, then the search engine may not be able to crawl all the necessary pages on the website.

To ensure you’re not exceeding your crawl budget and negatively impacting your website’s SEO, you must first understand how Googlebot crawls websites. Generally, Googlebot will visit a website twice daily, once in the morning and once in the evening.

During those visits, Googlebot will attempt to crawl as many pages as possible. However, if your website has many pages, especially deep within your website’s architecture, there’s a good chance that not all of those pages will be crawled during those two visits. Having a solid crawl budget ensures that all of the essential pages on your website are crawled by Googlebot so they can be indexed and ranked accordingly.

The crawl budget is essential to consider because it can directly impact how well your website is indexed and ranked. If your website has many URLs, or if your pages load slowly, your crawl budget may be exhausted before the search engine bots have had a chance to index all of your pages. This can lead to lower rankings and reduced traffic.

What’s the importance of a crawl budget?

Your website can become irrelevant in search engine results pages (SERPs) without a solid crawl budget. To maintain a healthy crawl budget, you must ensure that Google and other search engines have properly indexed your website. You can add sitemaps and submit them through Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.

You should also ensure that your website is fast-loading and error-free so that crawlers won’t get stuck on broken links or images. Additionally, you can use the Fetch as Google tool in Google Search Console to troubleshoot indexing issues on your website.

How can you optimize your crawl budget?

You can do a few things to optimize your website’s crawl budget and ensure that your pages get the attention they deserve from the search engines.

• Make sure that your website is structured correctly. Use a logical hierarchy for your pages, with the most important pages at the top. Break your content into manageable chunks, and use clear and concise titles and descriptions.
• Optimize your page load speed. Use quality images and videos, and ensure your code is clean and efficient. Minimize the use of Flash and other plugins, and use a content delivery network (CDN) to speed up page loading times.
• Use the proper robots.txt directives to control the crawling and indexing of your website. Be sure to exclude any pages you don’t want to be indexed, and use the “noindex” tag to tell the search engines not to include those pages in their search results.
• Use the Google Search Console to track your website’s crawl budget and indexing status. The Search Console provides valuable information on how many pages have been indexed, how many have been blocked from indexing, and how much of your website’s content is being crawled.

By following these tips, you can optimize your website’s crawl budget and ensure that your pages get the attention they deserve from search engines.

A crawl budget is crucial because it allows your business to control how much it spends on crawling and indexing its website. This is important because it ensures that your website is being crawled and indexed effectively, which can help improve your website’s ranking on search engines.