Understanding Crawl Budget to Properly Index Sites for Google Searches

These days, the term “crawl budget” is frequently used in the world of SEO. But, most people do not have a clear idea about what exactly is it or what does it mean for Googlebot. Read on to get a brief idea about it. Before we start, it is important to clear out that for most publishers, it is just nothing to worry about. Even if, you want your newly included pages to be crawled on the same day of publication, you do not need to focus on crawl budget. On the other hand, if you have a large site, then it is important to decide how much resource your hosting server can allocate to crawling and when. It is also equally important to prioritise what to crawl. 

Googlebot and crawl rate:

The main objective of Googlebot is crawling websites. Simultaneously, it also makes sure that the crawling task does not affect user experience . This approach is termed as “crawl rate limit” and it restricts the maximum fetching rate for a particular website. The crawl rate for any site basically depends on a pair of factors and thus, it may fluctuate from time to time. The factors include:

• Crawl health – If your site responds fast to crawling at some point, the crawl rate goes up. It indicates, Googlebot can use more connections to crawl through. Similarly, if the response slows down, the crawl rate sinks and the bot performs less crawling.
• Search console limit – As a website owner, you can also reduce the bot’s crawling rate on your site. But, it is important to note that settting a higher crawling rate does not actually help Googlebot to crawl sites faster.

Demand to crawl:

According to SEO experts, the factor that plays important role to set crawl demand for any website is:

• Popularity of URLs – Usually, more popular URLs are crawled more frequently as compared to the rest.

Thus, attempts are made on regular basis to keep URLs fresh and lively. The factors of crawl demand and crawl rate are taken together to define crawl budget of any website. Thus, crawl budget   indicates the number of URLs that Googlebot is willing and capable to crawl for any given site.

Factors that affect crawl budget for websites:

A large number of SEO experts are of the opinion that presence of low-value-add URLs in a website hampers its indexing and crawling rates. The categories that low-value-add URLs fall into are as following:

• Soft error pages
• Hacked pages
• On-site duplicate content
• Infinite spaces and proxies
• Session identifiers and faceted navigation
• Poor quality spam content

Avoiding wastage of server resources:

Thus, it is not proper to waste server resources on the type of webpages mentioned above, as that will shift the focus of crawl activity from high-value pages. This may stand in the way of Googlebot discovering high-quality content on your site faster. 

The entry point for your website to get into Google Search Engine Result Pages is crawling.  Thus, as a website owner, you need to make sure from your end that Googlebot efficiently crawls through the site. The effort will help your site get properly indexed to show up in Google organic search results.