SEO : Tips To Optimize Crawl Budget

Computer programs designed to collect information from web pages are called web spiders, crawlers or bots. Crawl Budget is the number of pages bots (eg: Googlebot) crawls and indexes on a website within a time-frame. Factor which influence the same are the crawl rate limit set for the site and the crawl demand which also act as balancing attributes so that the web-server is able to cater the requests from the bots .

Optimizing your crawl budget means increasing how often bots can “visit” each page, collect information and send that data to its corresponding algorithms in charge of indexing and evaluating content quality. Better your crawl budget, the faster your information will be updated in search engine indexes when you make changes to your site.

Importance of Crawl Budget

If number of pages exceed the crawl budget for your site , some of the pages would not feature in Google's Index. Most of the sites need not worry about this aspect as Google is quite good in finding and indexing pages

Those sites which would have to take note of this aspect are

• Large sites: Sites of major brands (eg: ecommerce sites ) having more than 10,000+ pages
• Sites on which there are frequent addition of new sections or topics with many ( > 100) pages
• Lots of redirects: Lots of redirects and redirect chains consume a lot of crawl budget

Optimization Tips

• Improving site speed : Making a site faster improves the users’ experience while also increasing crawl rate
• Robust Internal linking : Allows bot to access and index all relevant pages
• Build a flat website architecture
• Avoid orphan pages and soft 404 errors
• Judicious usage of canonical tags to prevent duplicate or similar content from being indexed
• Proper instructions to allow and disallow crawling of pages using robots.txt
• Never implement multiple redirects or redirect chains
• Use HTML as far as possible on your pages
• Fix and avoid broken links
• Set campaign based pages, isolated topics or microsites built for dedicated target groups on NO INDEX , moreover URL parameters sometimes result in same pages being treated as separate entries
• Update sitemap regularly and use Hreflang tags in a proper manner as required for (country/language) set ups

Crawl budget was , is and will remain an important aspect for large and complex sites across the globe . Those who can master the art of striking the right balance between content relevancy and volume will end up winning the race in the long run .

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