What is Crawl Budget

The crawl budget is the time frame allotted by google to google bots to crawl and index the complete website. For smaller websites, this is not the issue but for bigger websites with more than 10 thousand pages, this crawl budget is a very important factor in SEO.

Crawl budget can also be defined as the level of attention google bots give your site. It also depends on how frequently you update your website how frequently they like to crawl and how frequently websites can be crawled it also depends what is the reputation of your website.

What is the Crawl rate limit?

Crawl rate is defined as the maximum time for a google bot for fetching or indexing time for a website.

Crawl Demand

I will explain this with an example: If there are four pages and the bot comes to a website, google allocates the budget to 2 seconds. If the bot is unable to index the whole website left with 2 pages, which means there is crawl demand. If it will able to index the whole website then there is no crawl demand, there will be low activity from the Google Bots.

Crawl rate limit

At a time crawlers how many pages they crawl parallel. It all depends upon our server’s response if it is good then the crawl limit will be able to crawl parallel pages in a single go. Crawler crawls page1, page2, page3, and page4 pages of the website parallelly.

Scheduling

It is a mechanism in which crawlers prioritize the pages which should be crawled and when and which URLs are not be crawled.

How to optimize the crawl budget if exceeds for a website?

If the Google bot is unable to crawl and index all pages of our website in a given time frame then this is the case of budget exceeding leads to unable index those pages.

For a website if the crawl budget exceeds then we can improve the budget :

Update robots.txt

Allowing crawling of your important pages in the robots.txt file. Update website with proper robots.txt file allows and disallows.

Use HTML

Avoid heavy use of Jss, javascript code User crawler-friendly things like HTML. Use of script code is not crawler friendly

Sitemap updated

Any new page updated on the website needs to be updated on the sitemap.

Consider Url parameter

This means if we have a search option on our website: www.abc.com/search=? ?=means any searched term creates unwanted URLs consumes budget we should avoid this which means time frame.

Structure of the website

Need Proper site navigation. Proper website architecture on website or categorization.

Avoid orphan pages

The page has no internal or external links. Proper Interlinking.

Avoid content duplication

Improve the reputation of your website: On a regular basis, website update its content.

Improve server performance

Read blog Crawl Stats report by Google in Google Search Console.

Is it important to pay attention to the crawl budget?

When you run a big site: Website having 10 thousand pages

When you add a section having hundreds of pages and you want to index them quickly

Summary

In this blog, we understood Some Important Terms related to crawling budget like Crawl rate limit, Crawl Demand, Crawl rate limit, Scheduling, and how to optimize crawl budget. We want to crawl our website within the crawl budget. Update your sitemap on regular basis.