Understanding Crawl Budget

You may have heard the phrase crawl budget and wondered what it means for your website. For smaller sites, it’s not something that should cause undue concern, but understanding the concept can help you further optimise your pages and set your business up for better online success.

What is Crawl Budget?

Crawl budget refers to how search engine bots, such as Googlebot, prioritise which pages to check and how much resource they allocate to each site. New content like blog posts or updated website pages are typically crawled on the same day they’re published, with the process taking just a few seconds. However, for larger sites with thousands of pages or regularly updated content, crawl budget becomes a significant factor in ensuring all pages are indexed properly.

What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is a web crawler used by Google to fetch pages on the internet to assess and rank them. Considering the sheer volume of billions of web pages, it’s vital for Google to have an automated and efficient system to process and index content effectively.

What Factors Affect Crawl Budget?

Googlebot’s primary task is to crawl pages and rank them, but it needs to do so without negatively impacting the experience of users visiting the site simultaneously. This is managed through the crawl rate limit, which determines how much fetching the bot can perform on a particular site. The crawl rate is influenced by:

• Crawl Health: If your site is slow, Googlebot reduces its crawling activity to avoid further slowing down your site. Once the loading speed improves, crawling activity can increase. This makes server speed and site performance essential considerations.
• Manual Settings: Website owners can choose to limit crawling for specific pages or the entire site using the robots.txt file or meta tags to restrict access to certain parts.

What Else Affects Crawling?

Beyond basic indexing, there are other aspects that impact a site’s crawl budget. The more popular your site is, the more frequently Googlebot is likely to visit it. This means that elements such as site speed and user traffic should be optimised in tandem. Pages that no longer receive regular traffic are often deprioritised by the bot, potentially impacting their ranking.

Additionally, major changes like moving your site to a new URL can trigger increased crawling as Google needs to re-index the new structure.

Why Should You Be Interested in Crawl Budget?

While crawl budget is more critical for larger, busier sites, even small businesses can benefit from understanding how their site is indexed to ensure pages rank as high as possible. Certain issues can negatively impact crawling, including:

• Low-Value Pages: If your site includes a significant number of low-value or duplicate pages, it can reduce the attention bots give your site.
• Site Security: If your site has been compromised by hackers, this can negatively affect crawling.
• Soft Errors: Pages with soft errors, where a proper 404 page doesn’t display, can confuse crawlers.
• Faceted Navigation: Filters such as date or price range used in navigation can create more complex pathways for bots to crawl.
• Session Identifiers: These can generate duplicate content that impacts crawling.
• Infinite Space: Dynamically generated links that create an endless loop of pages are problematic for bots to handle.

Optimising for Crawl Budget

Many businesses focus solely on content creation, keywords and other traditional SEO practices, often overlooking the importance of optimising their site for crawl bots. To make the most of your crawl budget, consider these best practices:

• Streamline Your Pages: Ensure your site doesn’t have an excessive number of low-value or duplicate pages.
• Improve Site Speed: Enhance page load times to boost crawl health.
• Use Robots.txt: Block unnecessary pages from being crawled by managing access through robots.txt.
• Ensure Site Security: Regularly check your site for security vulnerabilities.
• Fix Soft Errors: Ensure proper 404 error pages are set up and that broken links are addressed.
• Simplify Navigation: Keep navigation simple and avoid using session identifiers that produce duplicate content.

Understanding and optimising your crawl budget can help your site stay visible in search engine rankings and improve its overall SEO health. Whether your site is large or small, paying attention to these factors will keep your site’s performance in top shape.

For more insights and help optimising your website for better SEO performance, contact The Last Hurdle’s digital marketing experts at 01604 654545 or email hello@thelasthurdle.co.uk.