Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is the number of pages that search engines like Google are willing and able to crawl on your website within a certain amount of time.

Generally speaking, Google rarely crawls every page of every website, and will only allocate a finite amount of its crawling effort to each site based on factors such as size, health, and importance.

The term “crawl budget” is the SEO name that’s been given to these types of allocations, and they determine just how quickly and thoroughly your pages can be discovered during Google’s indexing efforts.

How Crawl Budget Works

The chances are that crawl budget won’t be something that you need to worry about. If your website has a few hundred or even a few thousand pages, Google will be able to comfortably crawl all of your content without any issue.

The concept is much more important for far larger websites that possess tens of thousands of pages or more. Think big eCommerce stores, large publishers, or sprawling online databases, where Google’s finite crawling attention gets spread thinner across more URLs than it can handle in one fell swoop.

If you’re at risk of crawl budget issues, your priority should be to ensure that Google uses its limited crawling capabilities on your most important pages, rather than wasting them on low-value ones.

There are plenty of factors that can eat into your crawl budget unnecessarily. For instance, multiple duplicate URLs created by parameters and faceted navigation, large numbers of thin or low-quality pages, long redirect chains, broken links leading nowhere, and orphan pages can all consume crawling that could’ve gone to pages you actually want indexed.

Cleaning up these inefficiencies can help to free up the budget for what really matters when supporting your ranking ambitions.

Managing Crawl Budget

Fortunately, the ways to manage your crawl budget are commonplace in SEO, and the tools you’ll use are likely to be familiar if you’ve ever sought to optimise your pages before.

For instance, a well-maintained XML sitemap can point Google directly to your most important URLs. Your robots.txt file can also stop crawlers from wasting their time on sections that don’t need indexing.

Additionally, canonical tags can consolidate duplicate pages so Google knows not to crawl multiple versions of the same content. Logical site structures with good internal linking can also help to prioritisie your key pages accordingly, and keeping your website fast and error-free allows Google to crawl more. This is because a healthy and responsive site indicates to search engines that it’s worth the attention.

Practical Tips

When it comes to keeping on top of your allocated crawl budget, the chances are that if you’re a website with fewer than ten thousand pages, you only have to manage the basics to ensure that you’re crawlable and Google will do the rest.

In this case, your efforts are best left spent on content and links rather than endlessly attempting to priorise your strongest pages.

If you do have a large website, however, try to treat your crawl budget as a key area of your SEO strategy, because when it comes to scale, ensuring that Google is focusing on the right pages while ignoring the noise can have a profound impact on how your site actually ranks.

Knowing whether the scale of Google’s crawling efforts on your pages is half the battle, and paving the way for a frictionless crawler experience is the rest.