What is Crawl Budget?
The crawl budget is the amount of time and resources a search engine allocates to crawling a website within a specific timeframe. It varies across search engines and is influenced by two main factors:
- Crawl Demand: The frequency of updates and the popularity of pages.
- Crawl Rate Limit: Impacted by server performance and crawl settings in tools like Google Search Console.
Why is Crawl Budget Important?
The crawl budget determines how many pages a search engine can crawl and how often they can be re-crawled. Efficient use of the crawl budget ensures important pages are indexed and updated regularly, which is crucial for SEO.
When to Worry About Crawl Budget?
- Sites with over 1 million pages.
- Sites with frequent content updates.
- News websites.
- Sites with many “Discovered – currently not indexed” URLs in Google Search Console.
How to Increase Crawl Budget?
- Speed Up Server and Decrease Page Load Times: Use reliable hosting and CDN, optimize page speed by reducing unnecessary large resources, and avoid long redirect chains.
- Add More Links: Increase internal and external links to important pages to signal their importance to search engines.
- Fix Broken Links and Reduce Redirects: Identify and fix 404/410 errors and streamline redirect chains to prevent crawl budget waste.
- Use Indexing API: If applicable, use Google’s Indexing API for quicker updates.
FAQs:
- Does Googlebot Respect Crawl-Delay in Robots.txt?
No, Googlebot does not respect crawl-delay settings in robots.txt. - When Should You Care About Crawl Budget?
Only for very large or frequently updated websites. - How Can I Check My Website’s Crawl Budget?
Use Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report for an overview of crawl activity.
