What is Crawl Budget ?

Crawl Budget and Why Is It Important for SEO?

 

Crawl budget is a term in the world of SEO that refers to the number of pages Googlebot, Google’s web crawling bot, crawls and indexes on a website within a specific timeframe. It’s essentially the amount of time and resources Google allocates to your website for crawling and indexing.

 

But why is the crawl budget important for SEO, and why should website owners and SEO practitioners pay attention to it?

 

1. Indexation and Ranking:

In a nutshell, if Google doesn’t crawl and index a page on your website, that page is unlikely to appear in search engine results for relevant queries. In other words, no indexing means no ranking. So, if your website’s number of pages exceeds your allocated crawl budget, you risk having important pages left out of Google’s index, which can directly impact your search engine visibility.

 

2. Efficient Resource Allocation:

While Google is quite proficient at finding and indexing web pages, there are scenarios where crawl budget management becomes critical:

 

• Large Websites: If you manage a large website with thousands or even millions of pages (common for e-commerce sites), Google may struggle to crawl and index all of them efficiently. This is where optimising your crawl budget becomes essential to ensure the most critical pages are crawled and indexed promptly.
• New Content: When you add a substantial amount of new content to your website, such as a new section or a large number of pages, you want to ensure that Googlebot can crawl and index them swiftly. Otherwise, your new content won’t be visible in search results when it matters most.
• Minimising Wasted Resources: Google allocates resources based on crawl budget. If your site has many low-quality or duplicate pages, Googlebot may waste precious crawl resources on unimportant content. By optimising your crawl budget, you can ensure Google focuses on the pages that truly matter.

 

3. Faster Indexation:

Website speed plays a significant role in SEO. Slow-loading pages not only provide a poor user experience but also consume valuable Googlebot time. When your website loads quickly, Googlebot has more time to visit and index a greater number of pages during each crawl session. This can lead to faster indexation of new or updated content, ensuring your site remains fresh in Google’s index.

 

4. Maximising Link Authority:

Google prioritises crawling pages that have a significant number of external and internal links pointing to them. To make the most of your crawl budget, it’s crucial to ensure that important pages receive sufficient link authority through internal linking. This helps Google discover and crawl all the pages you want to be indexed.

5. Avoiding “Orphan Pages”:

Orphan pages are those that lack both internal and external links. Google has a hard time discovering these pages, which can lead to them being excluded from the index. To make full use of your crawl budget, ensure that every page on your website has at least one internal or external link pointing to it.

 

6. Minimising Duplicate Content:

Duplicate content can confuse search engines and hinder efficient crawl budget utilisation. Google aims to avoid indexing multiple pages with identical content. By maintaining unique, high-quality content across your site, you can ensure that crawl resources are allocated to valuable, distinctive content.

 

In conclusion, crawl budget is a vital aspect of SEO that determines how efficiently Googlebot crawls and indexes your website. By optimising your crawl budget, you can enhance your website’s indexation, ranking, and overall search engine visibility. Whether you run a large website, frequently add new content, or want to maximise the impact of your crawl resources, understanding and managing crawl budget is a crucial part of successful SEO strategy.