What exactly is crawl budget and how can we make sure we use it to our advantage? The crawl budget is the budget that Google or search engines in general spend on crawling one or more web pages. However, the budget is limited, so the search engine may not have enough budget to crawl all the URLs of a large website. It also includes the time spent crawling each page, which depends on a number of factors, such as the popularity of the page, the response time of the website, and the age of the content.
What do crawl rate and crawl demand mean?
The crawl budget consists of two components:
- Crawl-Rate: The crawl rate limit depends on the so-called crawl health. This refers to the time that a website needs to respond. With Google Search Console a limit can be specified.
- Crawl Demand / Crawl Need: The crawl demand depends on how high the popularity of the URLs is. Old and outdated content can have a negative impact on the crawl requirement. For example, a domain change or a relaunch can lead to an increased crawl requirement.
In addition to the crawl budget, there is also an index budget.
Crawl budget optimization
There are a few ways to optimize the crawl budget or use it wisely. First, users should make sure that the website is easy for Google to crawl. This means that there should be a well-organized structure with clear navigation and internal linking – keyword „Breadcrumbs“. Secondly, users should ensure that their website is fast and responsive. Slow websites are penalized by Google by being crawled less frequently. Last but not least, make sure that the affected website contains fresh, relevant content. Old, outdated content is less likely to be crawled by Google.
Thematically relevant sub-pages:
