Google’s crawl budget and your business website:
Recently, we talked about Google’s crawl budget and asked whether your website’s SEO (search engine optimisation) was optimised for this crawl budget, to ensure the best outcomes for your digital marketing efforts. In this article, we focus on some specific questions about the Google crawl budget and their implications for your website’s development.
Remember, to get your website to show up or be indexed in Google’s search results in the first place (or the search results of any search engine for that matter), the Google crawl bot or Google bot (or whichever crawl bot a search engine is using) has to actually crawl your website, to begin with.
So, crawling is the ‘entry point’, so to speak, for the indexing process and eventual Google ranking. The more efficiently your website can be crawled the better your website will be indexed by the search engine, thereby influencing how your website and its pages show up in search results.
But first, let’s quickly recap on what the Google crawl budget is all about.
What is a Google’s crawl budget?
The Google crawl budget is defined by Google itself as “the number of URLs Google bot can and wants to crawl.” In other words, the number of pages the Google bot wants to crawl (that’s the ‘crawl demand’) and the number of pages the Google bot can crawl (that’s the ‘crawl rate’).
The Google bot is designed to be a good Internet citizen because, while crawling is its priority, it also makes sure that its actions don’t degrade a human user’s experience of a website. So the crawl rate aspect of the crawl budget helps the bot to not crawl your pages too much or too fast so that it hurts your human users’ experience of your website.
The crawl demand is an indication of how much Google wants to crawl your pages – and this desire is based on how popular your pages are and how fresh or stale the content is in Google’s index.
Do Crawl bots have finite resources?
Google, or any other search engine, doesn’t have infinite resources to go crawling every page or URL of every website out there. They have to budget their crawling to enable their crawl bots to get to as many website pages as possible.
So, every website, including yours, has a crawl budget (from Google’s point of view). Once the Google bot has spent its crawl budget for your website, it stops crawling your website, even if it hasn’t reached all the pages that you wanted it to index.
While that’s a problem, the fact there’s a crawl budget for every website also means there are ways to optimise your website’s SEO for it. An efficient use of Google’s crawl budget for your website will help enable you to achieve the level of indexing you need for your website in order to be able to drive more traffic to it.
4 key questions and answers about Google’s crawl budget
So, if Google doesn’t actually crawl your entire website, then it would be good to consider how much of your website it is crawling, what specifically in your website it is crawling and how quickly it is able to do so. Here are some questions and answers to get to the bottom of these considerations.
1. Is there anything specific that will influence my crawl budget?
Never forget that Google is all about serving the best interests of its users, which is why popularity and fresh content are two factors that are particularly important for the Google crawl budget. These two factors also work hand-in-hand, because the fresher and up to date your content is, the more popular it will be. Having fresh, popular URLs in your website will go a long way to ensuring the crawl bots crawl it as much as possible.
2. Does the speed of my website influence my crawl budget?
The simple answer is yes! If your website responds really quickly, the crawl limit goes up and more connections can be used to crawl your website. If your website slows down, the crawl limit goes down and the Google bot crawls less. So, ensuring your website is fast and responsive improves not only your human users’ experience but also increases the Google bot’s crawl rate.
3. Do server errors and connection timeouts influence my crawl budget?
Again, the answer is yes. The Google bot interprets server errors and connection timeouts as signs that your website’s server is not in good enough shape, and so, to prevent causing a problem to human users, it crawls less.
4. Will my crawl budget result in a better Google ranking for my website?
The answer here is less clear-cut. Google uses hundreds of aspects in addition to the outcomes of the crawl budget in order to rank search results. Of course, while crawling is necessary for your website to be able to appear in the search results, it will not necessarily lead to a better Google ranking per se, unless it’s also complemented by the other aspects that Google rates for ranking.
5 tips for improving your website’s crawl budget
As crawling is a crawl bot’s main priority, it stands to reason that the best way to make the most of a search engine’s crawl budget is to make your site easy to crawl. Here are 5 tips for doing so.
1. Organise your website properly
It’s important to have a well-organized website where the most important content is easily accessible from the homepage and other important entry points. That means having URLs the shortest distance possible from the homepage via internal links. The deeper your URLs go to your website, the less the crawl bot will crawl there.
2. Avoid low-value URLs
You don’t want the Google bot wasting its crawl budget on pages that you don’t need it to crawl. So avoid all pages with low-quality, duplicate or spam-like content as these can negatively affect the crawling and indexing of your website. Not only do pages like this waste server resources but they will also drain crawl activity away from pages that do actually have value or that you really what the bot to crawl.
3. Have a reliable server
Just as server errors can reduce your crawl rate limit, having a quick-responding server that enables more connections will help to improve the crawl rate.
4. Ensure your website is quick-loading
A fast website with quick-loading pages will mean fewer timeouts, which will increase the crawl rate.
5. Always have quality content
Remember, fresh content (i.e. regularly updated) that adds value to the user will make it popular – and like human users, the crawl bots just love fresh popular content.
Optimisation for crawl budget is just one aspect of SEO
While it’s still important to remember that crawl budget optimisation is only one part of SEO, if you check all the above boxes in your website development, then you’ll be able to maximize your website’s crawl budget. That, in addition to staying focused on building a website that delivers a great user experience for your audience, will enable you to achieve the search engine rankings to drive traffic to your website that will generate valuable leads and increased conversions.
If you’ve got more questions about Googles crawl budget and your business website, and what you can do to improve your website’s SEO for the crawl budget, simply talk to one of our SEO specialists. The team at Net Branding, Auckland’s full-service digital marketing agency, offers professional support on SEO and website development and design, as well as being able to help you develop the full range of digital and content marketing strategies that will deliver the desired results for your business. We’re just a phone call or click away – so get in touch with us today.
