According to Google, a crawl budget is the set of URLs that Googlebot (Google’s web crawler) can and wants to crawl. In essence, this means that your website’s crawl budget is the number of pages on your website that acknowledges during a certain timeframe. Crawl budgets exist because the internet is too large for Google to crawl and index every single page, so crawl budgets act as a resource management tool. Crawl budgets or “crawl capacity limits” are also used to prevent Google from overwhelming your website’s servers. Finally, crawl budgets are used so that Google can focus on indexing high-quality content rather than duplicate or low-quality content. Learn more about crawl budget and why it matters by reading below, or get in touch with Boston Web Marketing today to get a free website audit and improve the way your website ranks on Google!
Do I Need To Worry About Crawl Budget?
If you operate a business with a small-to-medium sized website, you likely don’t need to spend much time worrying about your crawl budget. Crawl budget is mainly a concern for large websites with 1,000,000+ individual pages and medium-sized websites with 10,000+ pages that include regularly updated content. One other reason that you may want to pay attention to your site’s crawl budget would be if your Google Search Console page indexing report shows that a large portion of your pages are being classified as “Discovered – currently not indexed”. To find your page indexing report in Google Search Console, click “Pages” in the left sidebar, then scroll down and look for the box labeled “Why pages aren’t indexed”. If you notice that a large number of pages are classified as “Discovered – currently not indexed”, you may want to look into your crawl budget.
Why Does Crawl Budget Matter For SEO?
Crawl budget matters for search engine optimization because it affects how many pages on a website are crawled and indexed by Google, which directly impacts whether or not certain pages are eligible to be found in the organic search results. If Google doesn’t index some of your webpages, then they can not possibly be found in the search results. If the number of pages you have on your website exceeds your website’s crawl budget that Google has assigned you, it means that some of your pages will not be indexed. If you would like to increase your crawl budget and help more of your pages get indexed, some things you can do include:
- Improve PageSpeed
- Use internal links
- Avoid orphaned pages
- Limit unnecessary redirects and long redirect chains
- Limit duplicate content
- Eliminate soft 404 errors
- Keep sitemaps up to date
Contact Boston Web Marketing!
If you have any additional questions about crawl budget or if you need assistance optimizing your business’s website, please contact our team at Boston Web Marketing today! Our SEO & Google Ads specialists help businesses in virtually every industry achieve higher search results and gain more leads! Give us a call today at (857) 526-0096 or fill out the contact form on our website, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible!