If you want to drive more organic traffic to your website, optimizing your site’s crawl budget is a great way to make it happen. Google's crawl budget is a cap on the amount of pages Googlebot can and will crawl for your site. By knowing what your crawl budget is and how to optimize it, you can dramatically improve your website’s SEO. In this article, we’ll explain what a crawl budget is, how to track it, and how to optimize it to boost your site’s SEO.
What Is a Crawl Budget? A crawl budget is the number of pages on a website that a search engine will crawl within a given timeframe. It is calculated based on the host’s capacity, the size of the site, and other factors. Google limits the number of requests it sends to servers, and that limit is known as “Googlebot’s crawl budget”. As a result, it is important to optimize the pages that Googlebot crawls to ensure that your content is properly indexed and can be found by search engine users.
How to Track Your Crawl Budget The first step in optimizing your crawl budget is to track it. Luckily, this is relatively easy and can be done using the Google Search Console. Here’s how:
- Log into your Google Search Console and go to the “Crawl” tab.
- Click on the “Crawl Stats” section and review the average number of pages crawled per day over the past 90 days.
Once you have an understanding of your average crawl rate, you can develop specific strategies to optimize your crawl budget and maximize your chances of showing up in search engine results.
How to Optimize Your Crawl Budget Once you know what your crawl budget is, you can take steps to optimize it. Here are a few tips to get you started:
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Limit URLs: If your site has a lot of URLs (pages), Googlebot can easily become overwhelmed and not crawl your pages as efficiently, which can have a negative effect on your SEO. To improve your crawl budget, focus on optimizing your site’s top-level pages, rather than creating too many URLs.
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Fix Broken Links: Broken links can confuse search engine crawlers and cause them to crawl your site much slower than usual. Fixing them can help improve your crawl budget.
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Monitor Your Site Performance: To make sure your site is optimized for Googlebot, you should monitor your site performance regularly. This includes making sure your site’s server is functioning properly and keeping track of your page loading speed.
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Utilize Google Search Console: You can use the Search Console to find out which pages are being crawled by Googlebot and optimize them accordingly.
Conclusion By optimizing your crawl budget, you can ensure that Googlebot crawls your pages quickly and accurately, boosting your site’s SEO. By following the tips outlined in this article, you can improve your crawl budget and get more organic traffic to your website.