Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine crawls and indexes on your site within a specific timeframe.
Put simply – Crawl budget is the limit set by search engines on how many pages they will crawl on your site during a specific period.
If your site has more pages than a crawl budget allows, they won’t get crawled and indexed. It’s as simple as that.
Crawl budget is influenced by two main factors:
Why care about crawl budget?
The truth is that crawling the web is expensive. Google wants to invest the least amount of money possible and extract the maximum amount of data.
The easier your site is to access AND the more popular it is, the more search engines will invest in crawling and indexing your content.
🔥 Increase your search traffic in just 28 days. Click Here Now.
What Will I Learn?
The types of websites that crawl budget is mainly a concern for are:
Large websites like ecommerce stores or news websites typically have thousands (or even millions) of pages.
This is where the crawl budget becomes extremely important.
Ensuring search engines can efficiently crawl and index large websites is crucial for maintaining visibility in search results.
Google will do their part…
But you also need to do yours. Otherwise, important pages might be overlooked, impacting the site’s SEO performance.
SEOs working on large websites must regularly audit the site’s content and structure to ensure they maximise Google’s allocated crawl budget.
You already know that it costs money for Google to crawl a website.
New websites need to quickly establish their presence on Google and prove that their content is worth indexing.
The truth is that most new websites are small.
That means Google can crawl them quickly and easily.
But your crawl budget is also smaller, which leads to Google not crawling your website as frequently.
Effective crawl budget management for small sites means ensuring search engines promptly discover and index new pages.
That’s why you should submit URLs to Google as soon as you post new content.
This initial crawling phase for new websites is vital for gaining early traffic and establishing search visibility.
Websites that frequently update their content rely on efficient crawl budgets to ensure their latest posts and updates are quickly indexed.
Here’s an example:
If you run a large affiliate blog and update your content regularly, you want Google to index those changes. Every time you make a change, Google needs to recrawl your website.
This eats up your website’s dedicated crawl budget.
The easier you make it for Googlebot to crawl your website, the more pages it will index. This will also ensure that even small changes on aged posts will be recrawled quickly.
And there is a kicker…
Regular updates signal to search engines that the site is active, which can acutally boost crawl rates and frequency.
That’s the end goal, right?
To check your crawl budget, you need to use the Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console. This will give you an idea of how often Google crawls your website and what portion of it is crawled.
Google defines a crawl budget simply as the number of URLs that they CAN and WANT to crawl.
That means there is no preset, generic budget per website. Each website has its own individual crawl budget based on Google’s evaluation of the site.
Use Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report to see how often Googlebot visits your site and which pages it crawls.
This report provides detailed insights into crawl activity and helps identify any issues. If you notice that your entire site isn’t being crawled regularly, you will need to start working on ways to increase your budget.
To increase your crawl budget, you need to optimise your website to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages.
Follow these six tips to increase your crawl budget:
Faster loading times make it easier for crawlers to access more pages within the allocated time.
That’s what you want, right?
Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify load speed issues and fix them quickly.
Optimise your images and ensure that they display on your website in next-generation formats like WebP and AVIF.
Remove unused JavaScript and CSS to reduce code bloat.
Check out my complete increase website speed guide to learn more.
Internal link building is an underrated SEO strategy.
It helps solve so many SEO issues and Google relies heavily on good internal linking to understand your website.
The truth is that your internal linking structure helps search engines discover new and important pages easily.
That means you must add as many relevant internal links to your content and pages as possible.
But make sure they are relevant.
You don’t want to add irrelevant internal links just for the sake of it.
Ensure you use clear and concise anchor text to link the related content.
Your anchor text should typically be the main target keyword of the page you are linking to.
Watch out for broken links and 404 errors on your website.
Broken links waste crawl budget because Google has to crawl them to realise they are broken.
They also send a negative signal to Google which can damage your rankings.
Regularly audit your website and use 301 redirects to fix any broken links you find.
Think of your XML sitemap as a map of your entire website.
It contains all your:
…and more in one file.
This is great for search engines because they only have to crawl one file to find all of your site’s pages.
Cool, right?
Keep your XML sitemaps updated and submit them in Google Search Console. Your sitemap will be updated every time you add a new page.
That makes it easier for Google to find.
Don’t have an XML sitemap?
Use Rank Math to create an XML sitemap for free. All you have to do is follow the setup process and copy the link into Google Search Console.
Low-value pages will damage your site’s reputation with Google.
They will also eat up your crawl budget which can prevent other high-value pages from being indexed.
That’s why you should use robots.txt or noindex tags to block search engines from crawling and indexing low-value pages.
The side benefit is that you will increase the average page quality on your site as you noindex low-quality pages.
This means that Google is more likely to spend extra money to crawl your site.
Updating your content regularly is about more than just keeping it fresh.
It signals to Google that your website is active. The more you update your content, the more Google will need to crawl your site to index the changes.
This can actually work to your advantage…
If Google likes your content and thinks it is valuable, it is likely to increase your crawl budget and recrawl frequency so that the most updated content is always in its index.
That’s exactly what you want!
✅ How to increase your traffic in 28 days. Click Here Now.
Join My Facebook Group
