Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl in a given time frame. Crawl limit and crawl demand contribute to a search engine calculating the crawl budget.
We penned this down to demystify what is crawl budget and how you can optimize it for better SEO.
Understanding the Crawl Process
It is important to know the crawl process to learn what is crawl budget. It is how a search engine discovers new or updated content online. Search engines send out their bots to find new content.
The Role of Search Engine Bots
There are search engine bots sent out to crawl a site. These bots are automated programs. They are called spiders or crawlers. These crawlers search the deep depths of internet by going through web pages as they follow a link of one page to another one. This way they discover new content. Then they start will other set of URLs of known websites. These are websites search engines trust. They follow links on these pages for finding new URLs. The process is recurring and the answers the question of what is crawl budget.
Search engine bots mainly target webpages to crawl. But there are some which access content formats such as videos and images or even PDFs.
Search engine bots follow the rules established by robots.txt files of a website. It instructs the crawlers which pages it is allowed to access and which ones it cannot.
Crawling vs. Indexing: What’s the Difference?
The data search engine bots have crawled gets fed to the indexing process of a search engine. There it is analyzed and stored to be retrieved for when a user submits a search query.
Crawling and indexing are two very important steps. These work together empowering a search engine. They have different purposes.
Crawling is discovering process of new and updated pages. It is the bots following the links to one page to another and venturing deeper into the site. It does not guarantee the website will get indexed.
Indexing is when the search engine extracts important details from webpages. This includes keywords, titles and headings. This assists the search engine in understanding what the page is exactly about. Search engine retrieves relevant pages from its index when a user submits search query.
The differences between the two lie in the focus and outcome. Crawling discovers the webpages and indexes analyzes them. Crawling offers no guarantee a webpage will be accessible in search results. Indexing allows for a webpage appearing in search results.
What is Crawl Budget?
The number of pages that search engines crawl in a particular timeframe is the answer to what is crawl budget.
Resources Allocated for Crawling
Search engine crawlers and prioritization and efficiency happen to be two main perspectives to consider when it comes to resources that have been allocated for crawling.
Google crawl budget is limited as they have limited resources for crawling the whole web. So they instead allot a certain crawl budget for each site.
Efficiency is prioritized for google crawl budget. They prefer crawling the content with most valuable content.
Balancing Crawl Efficiency and Server Load
A balance should be found after learning the essence of what is crawl budget. Search engines prefer to crawl highly valuable content. Crawl budget optimization encompass of techniques like respecting robots.txt and following important links. To increase crawl budget, the pages need to be high authority as they are a preference of web crawlers. Unnecessary crawling is avoided by search engine crawlers with robots.txt files.
The time of server load and high authority of pages on a website work together to achieve a balance between crawl efficiency and server load.
Factors Affecting Crawl Budget
There are various factors that contribute in how to increase crawl budget. Search engines rank their priority to crawl a URL because of various factors. This includes:
- Importance of a website as search engines prioritize trusted and established website
- How often a page is updated as websites with updated content are more likely to be crawled
- Freshness and relevancy of content
These elements factor in how to calculate crawl budget.
Website Size and Complexity
The size of a website is a major factor that affects crawl budget SEO. Crawl budget is actually for large complex websites that have thousands of pages. Larger websites having more pages will definitely require more resources for crawling.
Page Load Speed and Server Performance
The speed of a page loading heavily impacts crawl budget. With pages having a slower speed to load, the website’s crawl budget gets negatively affected. Servers hosting shared websites on a server slows down the loading speed of pages. The performance of these servers is an active contributor in whether the crawl budget SEO gets smartly utilized or merely wasted.
Increase crawl budget optimization by minimizing the time taken to load a page. Have a faster website loading speed. Have a dedicated server to host your website. It will improve the load time for website visitors.
Content Quality and Update Frequency
Relevancy, freshness and popularity of a page determine quality of content. The frequency in the content being updated in website also matters. The updates you make should have value added in the already existing content. Crawl budget SEO will get wasted otherwise. Websites with more frequently updated content gets crawled more.
Prioritizing Important Pages for Crawling
Determine the most important of your pages. Prioritize them accordingly for crawling. Fresh new content that holds the highest importance in your website should be submitted to get crawled first.
Minimizing Crawl Errors and Broken Links
Fix any broken links and work to reduce any resulting crawl errors. Reference pages that do not exist any longer are broken links. They make for a bad crawl budget SEO.
Utilizing Sitemap and Robots.txt Effectively
Use robots.txt files to indicate search engine to not crawl duplicate content, URLs with parameters, and to signal them to the content you want indexed.
FAQs
- What is crawl budget?
It is search engines crawling a number of pages in a particular time frame.
- How to increase crawl budget?
There are different things that increase crawl budget of a website including optimizing website, minimizing the page load and improving the quality of content.
