Crawl Budget is the number of pages that Google bots crawl and index on a website within a specific time frame.
Why is Crawl Budget Important for SEO?
Simply put, “If Google doesn’t index a page, it won’t rank it for anything in the future.” Therefore, if the number of pages exceeds your site’s crawl budget, it means you’ll have pages on your site that are not indexed.
However, most existing sites don’t need to worry much about crawl budget because Google has highly effective algorithms for discovering and indexing pages.
However, there are a few situations where you should pay attention to crawl budget:
- If you are using a big site: If you have a 10k+ page website (like an e-commerce site), Google may have a hard time finding them all.
- You’ve added a few pages: If you’ve recently added a new section to your site with hundreds of pages, you may want to make sure you have the crawl budget to get them all indexed quickly.
- If there are many redirects: Many redirects and redirect chains eat up your browsing budget.
Here are some simple ways you can optimize your site’s crawl budget:
Increase Site Speed
Improving your site’s page speed will help Googlebot crawl more of your site’s URLs.
In fact, Google reports the following about this:
“Making a site faster improves the user experience while also increasing crawl speed.”
In other words:
Slow-loading pages also consume valuable Googlebot crawl time.
However, if your pages load quickly, Googlebot will have more time to visit and index your pages.
Use Internal Links
Googlebot prioritizes pages with a high number of external and internal links.
Ideally, you should have backlinks pointing to every page on your site, but this is often not a realistic approach in most cases.
That’s why internal linking is so important.
Internal links direct Googlebot to all the different pages on your site that you want to have indexed.
Vertical Website Architecture
“URLs that are more popular on the internet tend to be crawled more frequently to ensure they remain fresher in our index.”
In Google’s world, popularity equals link authority.
Therefore, using a hierarchical website architecture on your site will help you achieve better results.
A hierarchical architecture keeps things organized, ensuring that each page on your site has its own flowing link authority.
Why Are Orphan Pages a Problem for SEO?
Orphan pages are pages that do not have internal or external links pointing to them.
Google has a really hard time finding orphan pages. So if you want to get the most out of your crawling budget, ensure that there is at least one internal or external link pointing to every page on your site. Without internal links, you cannot transfer any authority to the pages on your site. For this reason, search engines may struggle to evaluate your pages.
Limit Duplicate Content
Limiting duplicate content is a smart approach for many reasons.
It appears that duplicate content can harm your crawl budget.
This is because Google does not want to waste resources indexing multiple pages with the same content.
Therefore, ensure that 100% of the pages on your site have unique and high-quality content.
This is not an easy task for a 10k+ page site, but it has become a necessity if you want to get the most out of your crawling budget.
