Crawl Budget

What is the Crawl Budget?

The crawl budget refers to the daily limit that Google's bots have to crawl pages of your website, in order to subsequently index and rank them within the search results. When a bot lands on your website, it has a limited amount of time and will not simply crawl all pages. The duration of a Google bot visit varies from day to day. Therefore, it is crucial to make this visit as efficient as possible and to extract everything from it. It is of extreme importance to closely examine the technical aspects of your website and to eliminate any technical obstacles that could significantly delay a Google bot during its visit.

How is the Crawl Budget precisely determined?

The crawl budget is determined by the authority of your website. A high authority means a higher crawl budget. When Google discovers new pages during indexing, these pages are placed at the end of the queue and are read later. If there are many links on the pages and the crawl budget is small, you will end up with a long queue, which will be indexed later.

Where can you see which pages are in the queue?

Have you registered your website with Google Search Console yet? If not, do it as soon as possible! Within Google Search Console, you click on 'pages' and then you will see an overview of why pages are not indexed:

The message 'discovered - currently not indexed' lists all the remaining pages in the queue. This often happens because Google thinks that the website might become overloaded at the time they plan to crawl!

How do I check my crawl budget?

You can estimate your crawl budget by reviewing Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console. This report will show you how many pages Googlebot has crawled on your site each day, along with the amount of time spent downloading a page and the number of kilobytes downloaded. By analyzing these metrics, you can get a sense of whether Googlebot is actively crawling your site and how much of your site is being crawled.

How do you manage a crawl budget?

Managing your crawl budget effectively involves optimizing your site's crawl efficiency. This includes ensuring that your website is free of crawl errors, broken links, and unnecessary redirects, as these can waste your crawl budget. Additionally, improving site speed and server response time can allow Googlebot to crawl more pages within your budget. Using a robots.txt file, you can also direct Googlebot to prioritize important pages and to avoid irrelevant or duplicate pages.

How do I reduce my crawl budget?

To reduce your crawl budget consumption, you can:

• Consolidate duplicate content and pages with canonical tags.
• Block sections of your site that don't need to be indexed, like admin pages, through the robots.txt file.
• Remove low-quality or outdated content that does not add value.
• Improve the overall website architecture to ensure all pages are easily reachable through a logical link structure.

What is the crawl limit?

The crawl limit is the maximum number of pages Googlebot will crawl on your site within a given timeframe. This is influenced by your site’s crawl rate limit, which is based on the site’s capacity to handle the server load without being disrupted, and the crawl demand, which is determined by the popularity and freshness of the content.

Does crawl budget matter?

Crawl budget is particularly important for websites with thousands of pages. It ensures that the most important content is crawled and indexed. For smaller sites, crawl budget is rarely an issue, as Googlebot is generally able to crawl all their content without hitting any limits.

What are the two main factors that determine crawl budget?

The two main factors that determine crawl budget are crawl rate limit and crawl demand. The crawl rate limit is how many connections Googlebot can make to and how much data it can download from a site at once. Crawl demand is how much Google’s algorithms want to crawl each URL, which is influenced by its popularity, freshness, and internal site changes. In essence, if a site is regularly updated with high-quality content that garners interest, Google will likely allocate more resources to crawling that site. Conversely, if a site is static, with few updates and low engagement, the crawl demand—and consequently the crawl budget—may be lower.

Optimizing for these factors involves maintaining a healthy, regularly updated website with compelling and fresh content that encourages frequent visits and shares. Additionally, ensuring that Googlebot can access your content without hitting too many redirects or encountering errors will support a higher crawl rate limit. This management of technical SEO aspects, alongside content strategy, helps to ensure that your website makes the most of its crawl budget for better indexing and visibility in search results.

What can I do to get my pages indexed?

There are several ways to accelerate the indexing process:

1. Request a re-index manually via Google Search Console: enter the URL you want to be indexed in the search bar at the top.Then click on 'Request indexing.'Note that you can only use this method a limited number of times per day!
   
   
2. Add a new version of your sitemap to Google Search Console: Make sure that your new pages are included in the Sitemap you want to add.
   
   
3. Wait... it can be frustrating, but sometimes there's no other option!