Chapter 4: Technical SEO
Crawl budget refers to the number of pages and the frequency with which search engine bots (like Googlebot) will crawl your website within a given period.
Larger, more authoritative websites generally have larger crawl budgets. However, it's still important to optimize crawl budget for all websites, regardless of size. Here’s how you go about optimizing your website’s crawl budget.
First, improve site speed. Pages that load quickly are crawled more frequently. Optimize images, minify CSS/JavaScript, and choose a faster hosting solution to boost page speed. Then, arrange your site so it’s easy for people to navigate and for search engines to crawl. Here’s how you do those things:
Clean Website Architecture
Organize your web pages in a logical hierarchy.
Ensure internal linking is clear and easy to follow.
Use a flat structure, minimizing the number of clicks from your homepage to reach any other page.
Prioritize High-Value Pages
Prioritize the most important pages in your XML sitemap. Search engines often use sitemaps to discover new URLs.
Link to high-value pages frequently within your website, making them easier to find.
Eliminate Duplicate Content and Low-Value Pages
Use 301 redirects to point variations of a URL to the canonical version.
Utilize canonical tags to indicate the correct version of a page when duplication can't be avoided.
Consider noindexing low-value pages (e.g., faceted navigation pages, login pages) to focus crawl budget on important areas.
Reduce or Block Access to Unnecessary Resources
Utilize robots.txt - a file that allows you to block search engine bots from crawling certain areas of your website that don't require indexing.
Fix broken links or 404s because broken links and redirects send bots down useless paths, wasting crawl budget. Regularly find and fix broken links and errors.
Optimize Crawl Rate (Advanced)
Google Search Console allows some control over the crawl rate. Do this with caution. Setting the rate too low could limit how quickly Google indexes changes to your website. It's best for very large, frequently updated sites.
When you’re done, it’s a good idea to continuously monitor your site. You can use Google Search Console to do this. Find the "Crawl Stats" report to monitor and understand how Google interacts with your website. Also, analyze server logs can reveal insights into crawling patterns and help identify issues.
Now, it’s important to keep in mind that crawl budget optimization is a priority on larger websites and those with frequent changes or many low-value pages. Additionally, optimizing for crawl budget goes hand-in-hand with improving user experience and overall site quality for SEO success.