What Is Crawl Budget and Should SEO Worry about It?
Performance and site speed are two critical components to successful web search ranking. But if we look at it from another perspective, what will happen to your website if Google does not call and index your website? The answer is that the website will be useless. No matter how superfast and well designed your website is, to get in search your site must be crawled by a Google bot.
But an often overlooked aspect that you need to pay attention to is your crawl budget. The crawl budget is a very important but underused term. You need to know to better understand and improve the crawling position of your website. Some people think that crawling means to be ranked in Google, but it is not so.
Don’t be confused, By crawling and indexing, your website is visible in Google search results, for ranking you have to work on SEO in SERPs.
So today we, SEO experts in India will look at some of the super points of the crawling budget that are important for you to know. First of all, let’s look at points, which we are going to cover in this article.
Table of Content
- What is the Crawl budget?
- How does it work for your website?
- Is there a way to increase your crawl budget?
- How to check the current crawl budget?
- When should you worry about the crawl budget?
- How to fix crawl budget Issues?
- How can you stop crawling?
What is the crawl budget?
The internet is big, the index web has 5.5 billion pages and Counting. That’s the equivalent of over 15 petabytes or 3, George RR Martin books. That’s an incredible amount of pages for Google to crawl every day especially when we keep in mind that in some cases, Google can crawl the same web pages dozens of times per day.
Nevertheless, the current speed of internet growth and the rise of valuable content are the main reasons why Google, the biggest leader of technology development, cannot handle crawling all the sources at a sufficient rate.
To help manage this problem. We have the crawl budget. to understand the crawl budget. We need to address two things taken into consideration when setting up a crawl budget for a given website-
- The crawl rate limit.
- The crawl demand.
Let’s start with the crawl rate limit:
Crawl Rate Limit
Based on the current server performance of a given website, Googlebot adjusts the number of requests sent to the server and the number of crawl Pages in this piece’s so-called fetching rate.
The crawl rate is limited to Century limiting the fetching rate if a website takes too long to respond to a given number of requests.
The faster the service performance, the higher the fetching right. The slower the server performs the lower the fetching rate.
Since Google, it’s designed to be a good citizen of the Web, The whole algorithm has to have a small impact on the user experience. meaning it should not flow, crawl web pages and cause a decline in user experience.
Crawl Demand
The second basic Factor influencing The Crawling budget for a given web page is Crawl Demand.
Users are looking for valuable content so if a given website responds to user requests then it should be crawled quite often by the bot to maintain its freshness in the index.
The popularity of a given domain among users determines the crawling budget. addresses which are clicked in the result Pages quite often have to be fresh, So Google wants to prevent staleness of the URL address in their SERPs result.
Put those two things together, what you have is the making of a good old-fashioned crawl budget, whether your website scroll budget is high or low depends on the popularity of your site, and your serviceability to perform. It will help Googlebot determine whether it can and wants to crawl your website.
How does it work for your website?
Imagine that you have a hundred-page website, but your crawl budget allows for ten pages to be crawled per day, which means that when you create more content let’s say a page number 100 and 102 most Likely those Pages, might not be grown.
Google says: your website’s crawl budget may be affected by some factors as follows-
Factors affecting crawl budget-
- Faceted navigation and session identifiers.
- On-site duplicate content.
- Soft error pages.
- Hacked pages.
- Infinite spaces and proxies.
- Low quality and spam content.
Is there a way to increase your crawl budget?
Yes! So there are two parts to optimize your crawl budget-
1. Server-side
This means you want your web pages to do fast, it implies that the maintenance for your website is up to par.
2. Your Content
You want to have really good and original content. However, today it’s a quality game of quality. If You want to have original fresh high-quality Content. So that’s two ways to increase your pro budget.
How to check the current crawl budget?
You can do this by going to the Google search console and in the Chrome statistics section, there is a chart that says Pages crawled per day.
So if you do the simple math, you can calculate on average, How many pages Googlebot is calling your page and compare it to the actual number of pages on your website.
Check Out this video to know in-depth:
When should you worry about the crawl budget?
At Google Gary Illyes explains:
“We’ve been pushing back on the crawl budget, historically, typically telling people that you don’t have to care about it.
And I stand my ground and I still say that most people don’t have to care about it. We do think that there is a substantial segment of the ecosystem that has to care about it.
…but I still believe that – I’m trying to reinforce this here – that the vast majority of the people don’t have to care about it.”
Websites with fewer pages can easily be crawled in Google, but with a high number of pages tend to be crawled and not indexed in a short period until they fully satisfy the rule of crawl budget. But if you optimize your website from the point of Explain in easy language, the Crawl budget is a concern for those whose website is very big i.e. the number of pages is very high.
How to fix crawl budget Issues?
Illyes offers two types of solution for crawl budget issues
1. Remove less useful/ unused pages:
If your website has too many pages, then you should avoid those pages which are not useful for your side.
Sometimes it happens that when the website becomes very big then we forget to remove those pages which are of no use to us and such pages increase the size of our website and generate crawling budget issues.
2. Stop sending “back off” signals:
Back-off signals are server code that sends a request to search engines to prevent a website from being crawled. These codes are auto-generated, by eliminating these codes, you can solve the problem of calling budget to a great extent.
Illyes says- “If you send us back off signals, then that will influence Googlebot crawl. So if your servers can handle it, then you want to make sure that you don’t send us like 429, 50X status codes and that your server responds snappy, fast.”
Apart from these two factors, there are many such factors by which you can improve the crawling and indexing of your website. Let’s look at them one by one-
Website speed-
Site speed pertains to just how fast a site can load the content and resources contained about it. Speed affects a user’s experience of the internet site whilst also affecting how effectively search engines can identify, index, and crawl articles.
To index content fast, for example, news articles, Google has to be able to crawl the pages immediately. This includes having the ability to get the host quickly, with loading additionally loading immediately.
Strong internal and external links
Googlebot bookmarking pages have a lot of internal and external hyperlinks pointing towards them. Sure, essentially you would find traffic pointing to every single page on your website. But that’s maybe not realistic in most cases. That is why inner linking is therefore key. Your internal links send Googlebot to all the different pages in your site that you would like indexed.
How can you stoppage crawling?
If you want to be certain that bots like Googlebot and Bingbot can’t crawl your pages in any way, you may add directives to your robots.txt file.Robots.txt is the file found at the root of an Apache server that can disallow specific robots from making it into your pages in the first location. It is important to be aware that some bots can be taught to ignore your robots.txt file, which means you may only block which”good” robots using this particular technique. Let us use a webpage on your site, https://www.mysite.com/example-page/, as an example. To disallow all bots from accessing this page, you’d use the following code on your robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /example-page/
Notice that you don’t need to use your full URL, just the URI that comes after your domain name. If you only want to block Googlebot from crawling the web page, you could use the following code:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /example-page/
