Discover the secrets of the crawl budget and Googlebot! How does website crawling work? What factors influence the crawl rate?
Key Takeaway – The most important things in brief:
- Definition and significance of the crawl budget: The crawl budget determines the number of subpages of a website that Google crawls and updates. It is influenced by the popularity and trust rank of a domain.
- Factors that affect crawl rate: A website’s loading time is crucial for its crawl rate. Fast loading times increase it, while slow loading times and server errors can decrease it.
- Crawl budget optimization: To increase crawling efficiency, remove duplicate content, block unnecessary URLs, and provide up-to-date sitemaps. Avoiding soft 404 errors and optimizing loading times are also important.
This article focuses on crawl budget and how Googlebot works. Learn what tips you should keep in mind to ensure an efficient crawl.
To ensure the Google index remains up-to-date and user-friendly, Google sends web crawlers to search the World Wide Web. These bots search for new information and deleted pages to ensure they’re always up-to-date. Googlebot is used to regularly clean up the index. This process is called “crawling” and affects websites and their subpages. Some websites are crawled more frequently and intensively than others. This is where the crawl budget comes into play.
What is the crawl budget?
The crawl budget specifies how many subpages of a website Googlebot will crawl and thus add to the index or update. The decision about how many pages are actually crawled is made by Google itself, based on the popularity of the domain and the page’s trust rank. Although crawling is a top priority for Googlebot, it doesn’t happen at any cost. Google strives to avoid compromising the user experience when searching for search results. Therefore, there are crawl limits for each website.
Crawl rate and crawl limit
Your website’s performance plays a key role here. Fast-loading subpages increase the crawl rate because they provide you, the user, with prompt feedback. Slower loading times, on the other hand, cause Googlebot to assume the server is weak or faulty, which lowers the crawl rate. The website operator can also set this limit in Google Search Console.
Important: A higher crawl limit doesn’t necessarily mean Googlebot will crawl more of your URLs. That decision is still made by Google. But how do you increase your crawl rate?
Crawl requirements
Two factors cause Googlebot to increase the crawl rate on your website:
- Popularity: More popular URLs of large websites are crawled more frequently to keep the index up to date.
- Relevance: Google strives to prevent URLs from gathering dust in the index. When work is being done on the pages, Googlebot becomes aware and visits them more often.
The combination of crawl rate and crawl demand results in the crawl budget. If this budget shrinks, fewer pages on your website will be crawled, and their discovery will be more difficult. The crawl budget represents the number of URLs that Googlebot can and wants to crawl.
Avoid this to preserve your crawl budget:
- Website/server errors (e.g., soft error pages, 404 errors)
- Hacked pages
- Infinite space – pages without content (e.g, an empty event calendar)
- Bad content or spam
- Faceted search – clear navigation without confusing URL clutter
- Duplicated on-site content – same content on different URLs
How can I maximize crawling efficiency?
To increase crawling efficiency, you can use the following proven tips:
- Manage your URL inventory: Tell Google which URLs should and should not be crawled.
- Remove duplicate content
- Block URLs using robots.txt
- Use status codes 404 or 410 for permanently deleted pages
- Eliminate soft 404 errors
- Keep your sitemaps up to date
- Avoid long redirects
- Maximize loading time
- Monitor your website crawling
What is important?
To ensure a consistently high crawl budget, you must continuously optimize your website. You can’t create “URL deserts” with faulty or non-functional subpages. URL loading times also play a role. While the crawl rate isn’t an official Google ranking factor, it’s important for indexing. Search engine optimization (SEO) is therefore extremely important.
Googlebot determines how much it crawls. However, you can influence the available crawl budget to ensure that URLs with high-quality content or those of great importance to your business are crawled. You can identify subpages with little information or 404 errors and exclude them from crawling.
You can find more information about crawl budgets and how Googlebot works on the Google Webmaster Central blog. Our customized SEO seminar will also provide you with the expert knowledge you need. As an online marketing agency, we also offer support to help you make your crawling more effective.
Want to optimize your crawling budget? Contact us now. We’ll help!