How do you avoid duplicate content and canonical issues that waste your crawl budget?

Google's definition of a site's crawl budget is "the set of URLs that Googlebot can and wants to crawl. Even if the crawl capacity limit isn't reached, if crawl demand is low, Googlebot will crawl your site less." Here is the document: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/large-site-managing-crawl-budget Crawl budget mitigation really comes into play with larger or more complicated ones that include URLs such as site_com/search-results?results=some_product_name. For each search a visitor makes on the website, a URL is generated, which could appear in Google's index. Using robots.txt and the meta robots tag we can block search engines from crawling less helpful URLs and efficiently guide them more important URLs.

If your site doesn't have a larger number of pages or the pages in the site crawled the same day they were published, then don't worry about the crawl budget. Large sites with 10,000 or more pages need to consider the crawl budget.

As Google states, crawl budget is rarely an issue unless you're talking deep into the 100,000s, likely into the millions of pages. In these instances, it is almost always crawlable non-canonical URLs (such as faceted navigation) that cause these issues.

Simply put, if your site is very large and has thousands of pages, then you must be concerned about the crawl budget. This is what Google says. Even if it does not have a large number of pages and still gets crawled on the same day you publish your content, then you also don't need to worry about the crawl budget. Just keep your sitemap updated and look for any issues in your GSC index coverage report, and that’s all.

1. I understand the importance of crawl budget and rate in SEO. 2. Crawl budget relies on crawl limit and demand. 3. Optimization enhances rankings and user experience. 4. Speed up your site, update sitemaps, and use meta tags. 5. Regularly monitor and fix crawl errors and broken links to succeed in SEO.

I agree with this, and will add that crawl rate can be controlled in Bing Web Webmaster Tools, where Google has depreciated the feature in Google Search Console.

A crawl rate/budget is the total number of web pages or URLs the Googlebot crawls in a given timeframe. Google determines the crawl rate/budget by: Crawl Rate Limit: The page speed, website size, errors, and the crawl limit set in Google Search Console. Crawl Demand: The popularity of your pages and the frequency at which your content is updated. The search engine decides what the crawl budget is for your website. Once it’s exhausted, it moves on to assess other sites.

Crawl rate refers to the speed at which a search engine's crawler visits and requests pages from your website. It's essentially the rate at which the crawl budget is consumed. The crawl rate can vary depending on several factors, including the server's response time and the importance of your website's pages.

I would say it is important to keep on updating old content and add new quality content that provides value to the readers. Also, it is important to submit your sitemap to Google through GSC, work on improving your website speed, fix broken links and build an efficient and useful internal linking structure. Block the unnecessary pages from indexing by using noindex tag. Avoid duplicate content issues with canonical tags, redirects, and meta robots tags.

I'd add that there's a higher probability of getting newer pages indexed on large websites faster when crawl budget is managed effectively. This matters when new products come to market. The online store who gets their product page indexed first is likely to have a head start to earn a higher position within the search engine results.

Optimizing crawl budget is like taming a herd of wild horses, guiding them to graze only in the green meadows of valuable content while keeping them away from the barren lands of duplicate, outdated or irrelevant pages. By skillfully managing their paths and energy you ensure that the horses go through your website with purpose and efficiency, uncovering hidden treasures and delivering them to the search engines' corral for maximum visibility. I'm going to nap now, that metaphor took a lot out of me...

1. Enhanced Indexing: By optimizing crawl budget and crawl rate, search engines can focus on crawling and indexing your most important and relevant pages promptly. This can improve your rankings and increase organic traffic to these pages. 2. Avoiding Wasted Crawling: Optimization prevents search engines from wasting crawl budget on low-quality, duplicate, or irrelevant pages. This ensures that valuable pages receive appropriate attention, maintaining their authority and relevance. 3. Preventing Crawl Errors: Optimization helps identify and fix crawl errors like 404s, 500s, or redirects. This improves user experience, prevents negative impacts on search rankings, and maintains a positive reputation.

To effectively avoid duplicate content and canonical issues that can consume your crawl budget and impact SEO, several strategies can be employed. Firstly, implement canonical tags on pages with similar or duplicate content to specify the preferred version for search engines. This helps consolidate link equity and ensures that the right URL is indexed. Maintain a clean and consistent URL structure, avoiding parameters, session IDs, or unnecessary variations that could lead to duplication. When necessary, use 301 redirects to permanently redirect old or duplicate URLs to the canonical version, indicating to search engines the correct URL to index.

Here are some tips to help you optimize your website's crawl budget and rate: 1. Ensure Quick Loading Times: Faster sites are crawled more efficiently. - Minimize server response times. - Use CDN (Content Delivery Network) to distribute content. - Optimize images and reduce their sizes. - Minimize and compress your CSS, JS, and other files. 2. Set Custom Crawl Rates: For Google, you can set the crawl rate in the Google Search Console, but use this with caution and typically only if you’re experiencing issues with Google’s bots crawling too often. 3. Reduce Redirect Chains: Limit the number of redirects between the original URL and the destination URL. Too many can waste the crawl budget.

The number of issues listed in this section by AI makes it sound like there's too much to think about when optimising for Crawl budget— in reality, it’s not. 99% of the World’s economy is fuelled by SMEs, that have websites running into a few thousand URLs at max. Unless your Site has a million+ URLs, please focus on 2 main areas for crawl efficiency: 1. Keep your XML Sitemap up to date – You can use plugins such as Rank Math or Yoast to create sitemaps, so you simply need to add the sitemap link to GSC. 2. Check your Page Index coverage in Google Search Console. You can see page URLs that are not getting indexed for a variety of reasons. Work towards fixing these issues. Repeat the above 2 steps on a periodic basis.

Protect your crawl budget from duplicate content and canonical issues: 1. Merge or rewrite similar pages. Redirect moved URLs with 301s. 2. Use rel=canonical tags to indicate preferred page versions. 3. Limit crawling of filterable content with robots.txt or noindex tags. 4. Include rel=canonical tags when syndicating content. 5. Optimize sitemaps and robots.txt to guide crawlers effectively. 6. Monitor crawl stats and fix errors. Prioritize mobile-first indexing. Implement these strategies to maximize your crawl budget and strengthen SEO.

1. Internal linking all the right pages through right and singular anchors per link 2. Crawl optimization through the use of no-index and canonicalization wherever applicable for a large scale website 3. Alt tags and title tags for images 4. Using SSR or Pre-rendering to serve HTML code instead of making the crawler render the javascript and spend less time crawling the links, content, media etc.. on your site

Two the most effective ways we've optimized crawl budget is by simply restricting search engines from crawling URLs with filter and sorting parameters, as well as blocking site search URLs which can and have gotten indexed in the past. We do this using the robots.txt file and a Disallow: operator. We also use the robots meta tag with a variable of "noindex,follow".