A crawl budget refers to the number of pages that search engines like Google crawls on your website on a specific day. That number can vary. Sometimes, Google only crawls three pages on your site while at others, it can crawl as many as 4,000 pages.

Your crawl budget depends on your website’s overall size and health, including the number of errors found within it. It is the amount of attention that search engines pay your site. It dictates how many times your website gets crawled.

Other interesting terms…

Read More about a “Crawl Budget”

Google would not instantly crawl a page. It can take a day if you are lucky, but sometimes it can take weeks before they even crawl your page. And this can hurt your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts significantly. For this reason, you need to know and optimize your crawl budget. 

Why Do Websites Get Crawl Budgets?

Search engines assign crawl budgets simply because they have limited resources. As such, their attention gets divided across millions of websites. To carry out effective crawling, they need to prioritize. By assigning crawl budgets, more websites can get crawled.

How Do Search Engines Assign Crawl Budgets?

Crawl budget assignment depends on two factors—crawl limit and crawl demand.

Crawl rate limit is how much Google bot allows itself to crawl your pages. It has to do with the capacity of a website to handle crawling—i.e.,the speed of your pages, crawl limit set on Google Search Console, and crawl errors. Crawl demand, meanwhile, pertains to the number of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) worthy of crawling or recrawling. The latter is based on a site’s popularity and how frequently it gets updated.

Can Crawl Budgets Become an Issue?

Let’s say that your crawl budget is 3,500 pages a day. But if your site has 350,000 pages, search engines will prioritize up to 3,500 pages only a day. That said, it can take months before significant changes you made can get noticed.

Why Is It Important to Know Your Crawl Budget?

You need to factor in your crawl budget when creating additional pages because you want search engines to crawl and index as many web pages as possible in the shortest period. The sooner these pages are indexed, the sooner you can reap their benefits.

When you don’t use your crawl budget appropriately, you won’t get your desired results. At times, even web pages that are not as relevant as yours can get crawled more. Search engines need to know your pages exist; otherwise, these won’t get crawled or indexed.

How Can You Increase Your Crawl Budget?

We cited three ways to increase your crawl budget below.

Increase Your Number of Backlinks

A healthy number of backlinks makes search engines consider your website trustworthy and authoritative, thus paying more attention to it. That’s why it is crucial to invest in SEO content marketing services to bring about the desired results.

Perform Regular Website Maintenance

Besides focusing on creating excellent content for your website, take a careful look at its overall performance. Detect and get rid of as many errors as possible. That means limiting return codes to 200 (OK) or 301 (Redirect) and removing all others. Additionally, make sure to avoid long redirect chains as crawlers might not get to the page you need indexed.  

Block Nonindexable Pages

Not all of your web pages need to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). To effectively use your crawl budget, block pages that don’t need to be in Google using robots.txt files.

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In sum, crawl budgets can significantly impact websites’ SEO performance. Ensure regular audits and populate your website with quality content. You can invest in SEO content writing services to create high-quality content and drive qualified visitors from search.