What Is Crawl Budget Optimisation?

Date First Published: 11th February 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 6/10

Learn more about what crawl budget optimisation is in this article.

Crawl budget optimisation (CBO) is the process of optimising a site to increase the rate search engine bots can crawl a website in a given period of time. Crawl budget optimisation is important because taking steps to help search engine bots index important pages will help to increase organic traffic and speed up the process of getting the pages listed on SERPs.

Crawl budget can become a problem when search engines are not crawling enough pages of a website or are not crawling them often enough. Search engines can only perform an assigned number of crawls to any given site each day as they only have a certain amount of resources to work with. For a large website, this means that search engines might only have sufficient resources to crawl a small fraction of the pages every day. This can have an impact on how long it takes for pages to be indexed or for content updates to be reflected in search engine rankings. However, there are certain things that website owners can do to optimise their website and make the most of their crawl budget, which are listed below.

Tips For Optimising Crawl Budget

Following the tips below should help you to optimise your crawl budget.

• Reduce crawl errors. If search engine bots come across errors when crawling a website, such as 404 not found errors or 500 server errors, this will waste the crawl budget and take the main focus off the important pages. This could also lower the crawl rate limit as Google automatically establishes the crawl budget based on a number of factors and one of those factors is how many errors Google comes across.
• Improve page speed. Google does use page speed to automatically establish the crawl budget of a website. Making a site faster improves the user experience and also increases the crawl rate. A faster page speed will lead to Google and other search engines being able to crawl more content over the same number of connections.
• Avoid duplicate content. Duplicate content can lead to SEO issues as it can confuse search engines as to which identical page should appear at the top of the search results page. When there is duplicate content on a site, search engines often spend a lot of time crawling pages that are accessible from more than one location or are identical, wasting the crawl budget. Instead, canonical tags or redirects should be used to choose the preferred version of the content.
• Avoid redirect chains. When there is more than one redirect between the original link users clicked on and the destination page, this can lower the crawl limit, waste the crawl budget, and cause the search engine’s crawler to stop crawling without getting to the page the website owner wants to be indexed.
• Keep the XML sitemap up to date. XML sitemaps provide search engines with a list of important pages, images, and videos of a website. This ensures that search engines can discover and crawl these pages more efficiently. The XML sitemap will need to be updated once in a while to ensure that the latest pages will be crawled more easily. Also, only the URLs that are canonical for the sitemap should be added, not non-canonical URLs.
• Block pages that should not appear in the search engines, such as error pages and checkout pages using the noindex tag.
• Improve internal linking structure. Internal links help search engine bots find, crawl, and index the pages on a website. Pages that have no internal links cannot be found or indexed by search engines unless an external site links to them since search engine bots follow links to other pages across the World Wide Web. A good internal linking structure will help search engine bots crawl sites more efficiently.

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