Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is a term that you will hear
thrown around a lot when it comes to SEO Philippines. If your website does not have enough
crawl budget, there could be negative consequences for you and your business.
So what exactly is the crawl budget? What are the benefits of having more or
less? Read on as we explore this critical aspect of SEO.
What is the crawl budget?
Crawl budget refers to the number of pages
crawled and indexed by search engine crawlers such as bots and spiders over a
given timeframe. Unfortunately, SEO and digital marketing communities often misunderstood
this concept.
Every website has a different crawl budget, and
Google automatically sets the crawl budget for your site. The search engine
determines how much budget to allot to your site by using different factors. Google
allocates crawl budget based on four factors:
·
The size of your site: Bigger sites needs more crawling
budget
·
Content updates: Google will prioritize content that is
regularly updated.
·
Server setup: The performance of your site and load times
might impact the amount of budget that it will receive.
·
Links: Dead links and internal linking structure
Although crawl-related issues can prevent
Google from accessing important content on your site, you should also
understand that crawl frequency is not a quality indicator. Increasing your site's
crawl rate will not necessarily translate to higher rankings. If your content
does not meet your target audience's standards, you are unlikely to attract new
visitors.
You cannot change this by getting Googlebot to
crawl your site more often.
Key concept to better understand crawl
budget
·
Crawl Rate Limit
The crawling process is
the search engine's crawler top priority on your site while also ensuring it
does not degrade the user experience. "Crawl rate limit" refers to a
limit on a given site's maximum fetching rate.
Essentially, this
represents the number of parallel connections Googlebot can use to crawl the
site, along with the time it must wait in between fetches.
·
Crawl demand
Crawl demand measures
how much the crawler bot wants to crawl a website- the frequency of updates and
how popular your site plays a role in this.
What is the importance of a crawl budget
to SEO?
The
crawl budget makes it possible for crawler bots to find a web page and ensures
that new content on the site is immediately indexed. Simply put, Google will
not rank a website if it does not index the page. Consequently, if the number
of pages on your site exceeds its crawl budget, you're going to have pages not
indexed. Therefore, for your website to rank higher on Google, you need to
ensure that its pages are found by crawler bots/spiders and subsequently
indexed.
Factors affecting crawl budget
Below are some factors that impact your site's
crawl budget:
·
Poor quality content and spam: Crawlers will also
lower your budget if they find a significant portion of your content
low-quality or spammy.
·
Faceted navigation and session identifiers: You may experience
issues with dynamic URLs and accessibility if you have a lot of dynamic pages
on your website.
·
Server and hosting setup: Google takes into
account the stability of each website. If a site crashes constantly, Googlebot
will not continue to crawl it.
·
Duplicate content/ article spinning: Duplication is a
problem as it provides no value to Google users.
What is crawl budget optimization?
In crawl budget optimization, you ensure that
the search engines crawl and index your site's important pages within a given
time frame.
Small websites do not usually have a problem
with crawl budget optimization, but large websites with thousands of URLs do.
Nonetheless, you can optimize your crawl budget by following SEO best
practices, which also positively impact your rankings.
When it comes to SEO, the crawl budget is an
important metric. It's one of many factors that will affect how your site ranks
in search engine result pages by Google. Without enough crawl budget allocated,
Google won't be able to index your site, and you'll get lost on page three or
four of search results-- not exactly where most people want their business to
be!
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