Storing and discovering content is the prime feature and work of Google crawling. That is why companies and organizations keep the crawling budget intact. The importance of crawl budget is defined by the company’s usage to get Google indexing on their content.
Common crawl budget mistakes should be avoided by any chance to achieve a more efficient search engine crawl. Crawl budget usually refers to the number of pages crawled by index and search engine bot on the website in a limited timeframe. Usually, those sites that carry a larger number of pages know the importance of the crawl budget and how it can impact SEO strategies.
It is important to understand how to optimize crawl budget for SEO because a crawl budget defines the success of overall SEO. Crawl budget plays a pivotal role in making an SEO strategy a success because crawling and indexing ultimately provide the best rankings based on the discovery of your content.
What is Crawl Budget in SEO and Why is it so Important?
The crawl budget is the crawl rate or crawl limits the search engine uses as assets to crawl the number of pages of the website in a particular time frame. The search engine calculates the crawl budget by measuring the number of crawls that need to be done without causing issues. Utilizing a crawl budget wisely can help in improving website crawl efficiency other than that if the crawl budget is wasted then search engines won’t be crawling to your website pages efficiently which will not allow the content of your website to be discovered.
The crawl budget is not the same for every website. The crawl budget for large websites is allocated widely because the crawling of smaller websites is different than that of larger ones. Some other factors that determine the crawl budget are links placed on the website, size of the website, freshness of content posted, and performance of the website.
Understanding Crawl Budget for Googlebot Crawling Frequency
A normal point of view of crawl budget is very simple which usually relates to site visibility in search engines. But when it comes to Googlebot the crawl budget is created on two elements crawl rate vs crawl demand.
Crawl rate: When a user operates too many unwanted landings on your site pages can affect your site performance and can usually overload it. Similarly crawl rate prevents the excess requests and repeated requests of Googlebot to crawl on site pages which allows no hindrance to the site’s performance.
Crawl Demand: Crawling demand depends on indexing on the site. Even if the crawl rate limit is not reached, still craw demand can advise crawlers whether it is necessary to access the website again or not.
Common Crawl Budget Mistakes That Can Impact Your SEO
Having multiple URLs that are in the path of crawling providing no value or less value should be removed; this is the major factor of crawling budget wastage. Crawl budget tips for e-commerce websites include solutions for this factor and other factors that impact crawling.
Mistake 1: Creating Faceted Navigation: Faceted navigation is nothing but the filtration users did for filtering web search results. Although it is not harmful for users, it is surely a problem for search engines. This promotes the creation of repeated content which means it will generate issues of duplicate content and crawl budget as search engines need to crawl and index duplicate content again and again which means the budget will be consumed and important content will be undiscoverable by search engines.
Mistake 2: Soft 404 Error: A soft 404 error occurs on the site when the server is responding with a 200 OK HTTP status code even if the page URL doesn’t exist this means the crawler will crawl on non-existing URL allocating the crawl budget rather than moving on to original existing URL. This impacts server response time and crawl budget both because the crawler wastes time as well as allocated budget by crawling a non-existing URL which makes it difficult for them to reach the original URL to discover efficient content.
Mistake 3: Increased Hacked Pages: Website indexing strategies include the diminishing of hacked pages at any cost. Hacked pages usually increase the number of unwanted URLs which makes the search engine crawler access website pages more often requesting repeated accessing which impacts the allocated crawl budget and SEO performance. If there are hacked pages on your site simply serve them by using code 404 not found so that the search engine bot can drop them and your allocated crawl budget doesn’t get wasted on accessing hacked pages.
Mistake 4: Sitemap Importance and Priority: XML sitemap is very important and plays a pivotal role in crawl budget optimization. Sitemap and crawl prioritization depends on the factor that pages included in the sitemaps are more easily accessed by the crawler compared to the other pages that crawlers discover while accessing the website. So, it is a safe play to put some important page content in sitemaps to improve crawling ability under the allocated budget.
Conclusion
These are some of the important ways that can help in optimizing the crawl budget for better SEO performance. But if an organization wishes to use some tools to analyze crawl budget then using Google Analytics, Oncrawl data, Oncrawl SEO crawler, and XML Sitemaps wisely can determine the filtered process of optimization of the crawl budget which will enhance the SEO performance of your site.