Crawl Budget
Crawl budget refers to the amount of crawl capacity or crawl requests that a search engine, like Google, allocates to a website over a given period.
It’s a measure of how many URLs Googlebot will crawl from your site within a specified time frame.
Importance in SEO
A website’s crawl budget is directly related to its search engine visibility. The more of your website that Google can crawl and index, the more content is available for users to find in search results.
An understanding of your crawl budget can help you prioritize which pages to index and which to exclude, ensuring that the most important content is given the highest crawl priority.
Example
Imagine a website with a monthly crawl budget of 10,000 requests. If the site has 100,000 pages, it’s important to understand which pages are the most valuable and should be crawled and indexed more frequently.
Do
- Prioritize crawl-worthy content by using internal linking strategies.
- Monitor your site’s crawl stats in Google Search Console to understand how Googlebot is interacting with your site.
- Use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to check the status of specific URLs.
- Implement pagination and infinite scroll in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the crawl budget.
- Consider using the robots.txt file to disallow the crawling of less important pages.
Don’t
- Allow low-quality or duplicate content to be indexed, as it can waste your crawl budget.
- Overload your site with unnecessary content that doesn’t add value to users.
- Ignore crawl errors or warnings from Google Search Console.
- Make your site difficult to navigate, which can prevent Googlebot from accessing all your content.
- Frequently change your site’s structure or add large volumes of content without considering the impact on the crawl budget.