Crawl Budget Optimisation

Complete Guide to Optimizing Crawl Budget for SEO?

The internet is too vast. There are more than 1.9 billion live websites and trillions of pages floating on the World Wide Web.

With such a huge pool of information resources to analyse, picking the accurate content to solve the searcher’s query is a demanding task for search engines.

In addition, search engines do not have infinite time and resources to continuously check all the pages available on the internet. So they scan a limited number of pages from websites and that is referred to as crawl budget.

Read on to understand what is crawl budget, why it matters, and how you can optimise it for SEO.

Why Does Crawl Budget Matter in SEO?

Ranking your website or web pages higher in the search results is the primary reason you perform SEO. But if the number of pages on your website exceeds your site’s crawl budget, then the remaining pages stay unindexed. Hence, they won’t rank and appear in search results.

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This is why you want the search engines to find and understand the maximum pages that you want to rank for in the minimum time. When you add the new pages on your site, the sooner they get indexed, the earlier you can get exposure to those pages and start benefiting from them.

Having said that, you only need to worry about it if you have a very large website with 1000s of pages. This usually happens when you are running an large eCommerce store or a large publisher site.

However, you would still want to use your crawl budget wisely and make the best of it rather than wasting it on pages you don’t want to be discovered.

How to Track the Crawl Budget for Your Website?

As compared to other search engines, Google has better transparency when it comes to revealing the crawl budget for your website.

Below we have discussed the two most common ways you can track the crawl budget of your website.

Track in Google Search Console

You can get insights into your website’s crawl budget for Google search engine if you have verified your site with Google Search Console. Here’s how you can check it step-by-step:

1. Log into Google Search Console and select your site.
2. Click crawl and then go to crawl stats in the drop-down menu.

Now, you’ll be able to see your crawl stats report. It may look like this:

We can see that Googlebot has crawled an average of 17 pages a day in the last 90 days for one of our test website. So the average crawl budget for this site is 17 pages.

Check Server Logs

Your server registers the logs of the events that happen on your website and constantly produces the log files. So every time a user or Googlebot visits your site, your server logs an entry into the access file.

You can check it manually in your system or you can use professional log analyser tools that provide you data in an organised way so that it makes more commercial sense to you.

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Thus, you can interpret the server log reports and track your crawl budget activities for the given period.

How to Optimise Crawl Budget for SEO?

Besides fixing the above issues that waste your crawl budget, here are a few crawl budget optimisation tactics you can follow.

Improve Your Internal Linking

Search engines prioritise crawling and indexing the most valuable pages of a website. One of the methods they use to identify such pages is through backlinks — external sites linking to your pages — and internal links on your web pages.

Though backlinks carry more importance, it’s not always in your control. But internal linking is completely in your control.

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Hence, you must optimise your internal linking practices. For this, ensure that:

• The most important pages have the highest number of internal links from other pages of your website
• All valuable pages are linked from the homepage of your site
• All the pages on your website have at least one page linking to them
• Perform internal link audit at regular intervals or at least once a year

Build SEO-friendly Website Structure

A simple website structure is ideal for SEO because search engine crawlers start crawling from the homepage and then visit other linked pages. Hence, the straightforward site architecture makes the crawling process easier and faster which optimises your crawl budget.

Hence, consider having a flat site structure that helps crawlers to reach any page on your site in less than four clicks. Moreover, it also enables easy navigation for your users.

Create Robots.txt Files

You can create Robot.txt files to guide the search engine bots on how to crawl various pages on your website. All major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo recognise and follow the instructions of Robot.txt files.

With Robot.txt files, you can block the crawling of unimportant pages on your website. This lets search engine bots spend more time on your valuable resources, index them and make the most of your crawl budget.

Enhance Your Website Link Profile

Search engines prefer crawling popular websites more often as they want to index fresh and valuable content. They also allocate a higher crawl budget for such sites.

Furthermore, web crawlers use the backlink profile of the websites to differentiate between the more reputable and less trustworthy websites. It’s one of the most fundamental SEO concepts that impact your site authority, credibility, and rankings.

So if you want to optimise your crawl budget and overall SEO performance, make sure that you get quality backlinks to your website. Remember, quality and quantity both matter when it comes to building your backlink profile.

Clear out Thin Content

As discussed earlier search engines’ primary focus is to serve the searchers with the best and valuable information out there. Just like duplicate content, thin or low-quality content doesn’t add any value to your users and SEO performance alike.

First, you need to find the pages with:

• Little or no text content
• Duplicate content
• Content that was published many months back and doesn’t attract any traffic
• Auto-generated content, etc.

Now, remove the unnecessary pages, block their crawling with Robot.txt files, and update the old content. This will help you maximise your crawl budget.

Speed up Your Website

Your website speed is an important ranking factor for search engines as it directly impacts the user experience. A faster website equals a better user experience. On the other hand, slower pages increase the bounce rate.

For instance, if your web page load time goes from one to ten seconds, the chances of bounce rate increases by 123%. A higher bounce rate on your website signals search engines that visitors don’t find the required information on your site. This may hurt your SEO efforts.

Taking the context of crawl budget optimisation, if your website loads faster, the crawlers can scan through more pages in less time.

As a result, more content from your website gets indexed and ranked if it answers the search queries.

Fix Broken Links

Broken links or dead links are the internal or external web pages that you linked once but they don’t exist anymore. Hence, the server returns a 404 error message.

Since broken links are live on your website, bots scan these links using your crawl budget. But you don’t gain anything from it.

So, here’s what you need to do:

• Find the broken links on your website using a broken link checker tool such as ahrefs or Check My Links.
• Let’s take Check My Links for instance. Once you enter the domain or URL, it will scan your web page and highlight all the broken links in red.

• Then replace broken links with other relevant links or remove them.

Thus, restoring the broken links can save your crawl budget from being wasted on redundant pages. Moreover, dead links are annoying for your users. So search engines also recommend fixing such links.

Use Hreflang Tags

Hreflang tags are a way to handle SEO issues for websites with pages in multiple languages. You can inform search engines about the connection between the different regional versions of a page so that you can target the language and the region in the same tag.

This is how the hreflang tag looks:

<link rel=”alternate” href=”https://example.com” hreflang=”en-uk” />

This link is targeted towards English speakers in the UK. If you want to target English speakers globally, remove the region code in the end.

Similarly, you can apply tags for the languages and the regions you are targeting.

Solve Crawling Issues

You can increase your crawl budget automatically by fixing the crawl errors. Google categorises crawl errors into two groups:

Site Errors

Having site errors mean Googlebot is unable to crawl your entire site. The common site errors are:

• DNS error: Domain Name System (DNS) error occurs when Googlebot fails to connect with your domain.
• Server error: Server errors mean that the bot could connect to your domain but can’t load the pages.
• Robots error: When Googlebot is not able to retrieve your Robot.txt files, it’s called robot failure.

URL Errors>

URL errors are limited to specific pages and are easier to solve. These errors include 404 & soft 404 errors or access denied errors (Googlebot is blocked from accessing the page).

You can locate URL errors for various categories in your Google Search Console.

You need to conduct a periodic SEO audit of your website to find and fix the crawl errors to optimise your crawl budget.

Final Thoughts

Search engines treat users as their topmost priority. So anything that improves the usability of your site is a value addition for SEO and so for the crawl budget. Similarly, whatever makes things difficult for your visitors hinders your SEO performance.

However, every little improvement counts when it comes to optimising the crawl budget of your site. So keep a tab on factors like duplicate & thin content, soft errors, and redirected links that waste your crawl budget.

Similarly, follow the practices that optimise your crawl budget. These practices include building a user & SEO-friendly website, solving crawl errors, improving your link profile etc. Also, keep checking your crawl stats report frequently to get the latest insights into your crawl budget.

If you want some help with optimizing the crawl budget for your website, you can get in touch with the leading SEO agency in Melbourne.