Crawl budget is an important SEO concept that sometimes we overlook. Crawl budget indicates the number of pages Googlebot crawls and indexes on a website within a given timeframe.

In this blog, we’ll talk about the importance of the crawl budget and explain how to manage and optimize it effectively with some useful tips.

What is Crawl Budget?

Crawl Budget is the number of URLs on a website which are crawled by search engine crawlers and indexed over a given time period. Crawl budget is limited to make sure the website should not receive too many requests by crawlers.

Why is Crawl Budget Optimization important for SEO?

if Google doesn’t index a page, it’s not going to rank for anything. So crawl budget is an important factor for SEO. You can optimize how the search engines scan your site by optimizing crawl budget. This will increase your chances of ranking higher in Google’s search results. This in turn help in increasing website’s visibility and its organic traffic.

Tips for optimizing the Crawl Budget

1. Disallow Crawling of Your Least Important Pages in robots.txt: A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests
2. Improve Site Speed: Improving your site’s page speed allows Googlebot crawling more of your site’s URLs. High-speed site improves user experience, thus increasing the crawling rate.
3. Update Your Sitemap: A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to crawl your site more efficiently. By updating it, search engine crawlers are made aware of any changes made to your website, including new or updated pages.
4. Flat Website Architecture: A Flat Architecture means that users (and search engine crawlers) can reach any page on your site in 4 clicks or less. A flat architecture ensures all of your site’s pages have some link authority flowing to them.
5. Use Internal Links: Search engines prefer crawling URLs which have more number of internal links pointing to them. Keep your pages optimized by eliminating any broken links. Using Internal links allow Google bots to find different types of pages present on the site that are required to index.
6. Remove Duplicate Pages: Search engines doesn’t want to waste resources by indexing multiple pages with the same content. Duplicate pages confuse search engine crawlers, dilute your traffic, and waste your designated crawl budget. 
7. Avoid Orphan Pages: Orphan pages are pages that have no internal or external links pointing to them. They waste valuable crawl budget resources. Ensure that proper internal linking is in place.

Wrapping Up

Optimizing a website’s crawl budget is crucial for successful search engine optimization (SEO). If the site is well maintained, or the site is relatively small, then there is no need to worry about the crawl budget.  But for larger or medium-sized websites use these tips to learn how to utilize most of the crawl budget effectively.