Rank higher by focusing on crawl budget

Crawl budget refers to the number of pages that search engine bots can crawl within a certain timeframe. Crawl budget is a factor that affects both a website’s indexing and its ranking. In this section, we’ll give you practical tips and strategies on how to optimize your website’s crawl budget to improve its search engine performance.

Why is crawl budget important?

The crawl budget determines whether your pages will be indexed and read by Google or other search engines. If a crawler does not have the capacity to crawl all of your pages, some will be left out. However, it’s rare to encounter websites with such a large number of pages.

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Challenges with crawl budget

It goes without saying that you want your pages to be indexed. You’ll soon notice that as soon as you create a new page, you can go to Search Console to check that it’s indexed.

3 signs you don’t have enough crawl budget:

• You have several thousand pages
  If you run an e-commerce store, it’s not unusual to have hundreds or even thousands of pages. The more pages you have, the harder it becomes for Googlebot to find them all.
• You’ve recently published many pages
  If you’ve just added a new section to your website, such as a blog, where you already had a hundred articles at launch, this could mean you don’t have the budget to crawl all pages.
• You have many redirects
  If you have a lot of redirecting pages, this can negatively impact your crawl budget.

How to optimize your website for crawl budget

Google wants to use its resources efficiently. This is why crawlers only crawl websites with links pointing to them. Of course, there are other factors that affect crawl budget, which we’ll now go through.

Website structure
The way your website is organized and structured can significantly impact your crawl budget. If your website is poorly organized or has many unnecessary pages, search engines may waste time crawling pages that don’t provide value to users. Make sure your website has a clear and logical structure that makes it easy for search engines to crawl and understand.

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Site speed and performance

Website speed and performance are crucial both for user experience and crawl budget. Slow-loading pages may cause search engines to spend more time crawling them, reducing your crawl budget since fewer pages can be processed. Ensure your site is optimized for speed and performance, and use tools like Google PageSpeed Insig to identify areas for improvement.

Duplicate content

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You’ve probably heard this already, but simply taking the same text and copying it to another page isn’t enough. Many assume they can create identical pages and just swap out a keyword for better SEO performance, but this is something to avoid. By duplicating content across multiple pages, you reduce your relevance, and Google may not even crawl or index these pages.

Guide crawlers with links

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What allows crawlers to navigate your website are links. This is also why Google can discover your site via links even if it’s blocked in your robots.txt file. The more links a page has, the higher its priority. Over time, you’ll build up a bank of backlinks to all your pages, but until then, you can create a strong internal linking structure.

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In summary

Crawl budget is the time and resources search engine crawlers, such as Googlebot, spend on crawling and indexing a website, and is therefore important for your site’s ranking.
To optimize your crawl budget, focus on site architecture, speed, and avoiding duplicate content. Search Console is a great tool you should get comfortable with.
By optimizing your crawl budget, you can improve visibility in search engine results and increase your chances of ranking higher.

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