Crawl budget refers to the number of pages that the search engine will crawl on your website on a particular day. The number of pages crawled varies every day. There are a lot of factors that contribute to Google’s crawling. The numbers of errors on your site and the number of backlinks are also determinants of Google’s crawling process.
Googlebot is a crawler that goes through the list of URLs systematically to crawl through a website. The robot.txt files are caught hold of every time to ensure that crawling is allowed through the site. After crawling a website, the spider keeps on adding the new URLs to crawl back to them.
Why does the crawl budget matter for SEO?
The crawler Googlebot crawls and indexes on a website in a limited time frame. SEO is important for improving the search ranks of your page. But if the crawler will not index a page, the search engine will not be able to provide any rank to your pages. This is why the crawl budget plays an important role in affecting the SEO services.
The issue arises when the crawl budget is beaten by the number of pages available. This will leave many pages devoid of indexation. However, the majority of the websites are not affected by the crawl budget because google is quite good at indexing the maximum number of pages. You will need to worry about the crawl budget in the following cases:
How to determine if your website has a crawl budget issue?
Ways to enhance the crawl budget
The crawling by Googlebot is enhanced upon improving the page’s loading speed. Increasing the site’s page speed leads to improved user experience as well as crawling. The crawl rate has increased significantly. A simple way to understand is that a slow loading page will take up a lot of Googlebot’s time. A good page loading speed will let the crawler open the site quickly and index it. It will lead to the indexation of maximum pages which is not possible in case of a slow loading page.
The pages that have provided a lot of internal and external are more likely to be benefitted by Googlebot. The crawler prioritizes such pages and would index them instantly. There should be backlinks going back to every page on your websites ideally but that is not the case most of the time.
Due to this reason, internal linking becomes very important. Internal linking leads the crawler to different pages on your website and most importantly the ones that you want to get indexed quickly.
The URLs which are more famous on the Internet appear more often in the search results. They tend to get more crawling rates so that they are maintained at the top in the Google index. For search engines, the more the popularity of URL, the more are the chances of developing a link authority.
It is the result of this situation that it is advised to use a flat website architecture on the website which is not much popular. The flat website architecture refers to arranging things in a manner that your website’s pages have some kind of link authority running through them to increase the indexing of your pages.
Any page that does not have an external or internal link pointed towards it is termed as an orphan page. The search engines find it very difficult to locate orphan pages and most of the time they are left unrecognized and unindexed. This is a great loss of your content and time especially if the content created is brand new. Therefore, to make full use of your crawl budget, provide some internal and external links to every page on your website so that the process of crawling and indexing becomes easier for Google and beneficial for your website.
The first approach should be to create unique and genuine content for your website. But if there is a need for using duplicate content, just limit its amount. Duplicate content can highly affect your crawl budget negatively. Google does not index multiple pages that have the same content. It becomes a waste of resources if this happens.
Always make sure that your pages contain good quality content which is different from others especially if you have a website that does not have thousands of pages to be dealt with. The process of producing unique content may become difficult in case of websites that harbour more than 10K pages but try to make it as genuine as possible. This is a must for improving your crawl budget.
It is important to have a pairing between the URL and the content. Make sure that every URL directs the user towards a unique set of content. This is a great way of streamlining your website and making it much more suitable for indexing and crawling. The closer you are to using this method always, the more are the chances of your site being recognized and ranked in search results.
These are some of the most amazing tactics to improve your crawl budget. By using these techniques, you can drive more traffic towards your website and improve the crawling activity for your web pages. This way your crawl budget can have a positive effect on SEO as well.