What is Crawl Budget? How to Save it and Solve Indexing Problem

What is Crawl Budget? How to Save it and Solve Indexing Problem

Crawl budget is a general term describing how often and how many pages google crawls from a website in a given period.

Author: Qasim Agha Khan

Published On: 04-01-2023

Seo Advance SEO   What is Crawl Budget? How to Save it and Solve Indexing Problem

What is Crawl Budget? How to Save it and Solve Indexing Problem

The crawl budget refers to the time that Google can spend crawling the web before it stops making new indexable pages available for search engines. The crawl budget is essential because if there isn't enough room in your server's memory, you won't be able to serve all of your customers' requests quickly. If this happens, users might experience slow loading times or errors when accessing pages on your site through search engines like Google or Bing. You can check the crawlability of your website by using ETTVI's Crawlability Checker. It will help you to check the crawlability as well as the indexability of your website.

What is the Crawl Budget?

The crawl budget is the time that Googlebot is allowed to spend crawling your site. The crawl budget helps you determine how many pages or requests you can expect from a bot each second. The formula for calculating the crawl budget can be broken down into two parts:

  • Number of pages and number of requests per second (RPS)

  • Number of seconds required for each page/request

How does Google Decide What to Crawl and How often?

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Google crawls the entire website in one go. It is called a single crawl, and it's how you can tell when Google has finished indexing your site. Google crawls the entire web daily at around 7:00 AM Pacific Time (PST). For example, suppose you live in California and visit www.example-site.com on Tuesday at 10:00 AM PST. In that case, Google will probably notice that information about your visit by noon that same day because it's still getting new data from other sources like RSS feeds or other websites which link back to yours. As a result of this link-building process takes three days for Google to index an article page on their website fully. Then again, our hypothetical scenario ends up being true even though they only have access during these times when those pages aren't indexed yet.

Why is Crawl Budget Important?

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The crawl budget is the time Googlebot can spend crawling your website. It's essential to set a crawl budget for your website so that you know how much time Googlebot spends on your site and how many pages it has crawled. Setting up a crawl budget is simple: configure Yoast SEO or another plugin with the option to turn off indexation by Googlebot (or any other engine). By doing this, you're telling Google that they won't see any new content added in the future because it would be redundant. So they won't waste their resources processing it unnecessarily.

Crawl Budget and Indexing Problems

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The crawl budget is the amount of time and resources that Google will spend crawling your website. You set a limit for Google to crawl your site, so they can figure out how much content there is on it and which pages those pages need to be indexed.

There are two main reasons why crawl budgets are essential:

  • It helps you understand how much traffic you're getting from organic search results;

  • It allows search engines like Google or Bing to track how long it takes them to complete their process by determining when certain pages should be indexed and giving an estimate for when new ones will become available for indexing if needed.

Server Errors

A lack of a crawl budget often causes server errors. If you don't have enough crawl budget to crawl all the pages on your site, then there will be some pages that are not crawled and indexed.

The crawl budget also affects server errors because it determines how many pages you can index in one day. The more pages that aren't crawled, the longer it takes for them to get crawled and indexed.

Slow loading Pages

The crawl budget is one of the most important things to remember when working on your website. If a page doesn't have enough crawl budget, it will be crawled and indexed slowly. It can cause problems like:

  • Slow loading pages

  • Pages not being indexed correctly

Not all Pages are Indexed

The indexer has several ways to determine whether a page is indexed. It can check the status report, showing whether or not Google crawled your site. If your site hasn't been crawled yet, some pages are missing from the index. These may be for any number of reasons:

  • The URL might not have been indexed yet (this happens if too many links exist on the page)

  • It could be due to a 404 error when accessing it (when there's no content available). If this is the case, try going over those links again to see if they'll take you elsewhere. One of them may lead you somewhere interesting!

You may have noticed that some pages are not crawled at all. They are blocked by robots.txt, a noindex tag, and a nofollow tag.

How to Optimize your Crawl Budget

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If you want to improve your website's crawlability, then you should optimize your website structure. By doing so, you can ensure that your site's content is high quality and relevant to users.

Optimize Internal linking

  • Make sure that each page is linked to other pages on the site.

  • Make sure that each page has a unique title.

  • Ensure that all pages have a unique URL and description, which will help search engines better understand what they're about (and thus give them more incentive to rank your site higher).

Improve your Website Speed

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First, you need to check your website speed, and ETTVI provides the best Website Speed Checker Tool. This tool helps you to analyze your website profoundly, and you can measure its speed. Loading time and page size. To improve your website speed, you can use the following tool:

A content delivery network (CDN) is a service that caches pages of your site on servers around the world. Visitors will not repeat those requests for images and other assets when visiting your site. The CDN does it for them. The more users visiting from different parts of the world or using different devices, the more you'll need more than one CDN account!

Solve Duplicate Content Issues

Redirects are an excellent way to fix duplicate content issues. You can use 301 redirects, canonical tags, and rel=canonical links in your website's code.

Suppose you have multiple URLs for an article or pages like www.mysite.com/content-page?id=123 and www.mysite.com/article-page/?id=456. In that case, it may be time to start redirecting instead of just copying everything from one URL to another to avoid duplicate content on your site that leads people away from what they want. You can use Canonical Tag Generator to prevent the duplicate content issue. 

Get Rid of Thin Content

Thin content is a term that refers to the lack of value provided by a website. When you see a website with thin content, there is no information or value on the page. It can be due to several reasons:

  • The author did not write enough words for the article.

  • The content is too long and needs to be edited down the length. 

The first thing you need to do when optimizing your crawl budget is get rid of these pages, so they don't take up precious resources in your crawling strategy. You can do this in many ways: You could delete entire categories or even entire URLs from Google Analytics depending on what type of data they contain (e.g., news articles). You may also want to use tools like Screaming Frog Extension. Which will help identify any issues with thin content by analyzing whether there's enough content within each URL/item before deciding whether or not it should be crawled further down into Google's indexing system.

Fix Soft 404 Errors

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If you're seeing a lot of 404 errors in your crawl budget, it could be because one or more of your URLs are broken. A broken link is an error when a user clicks on a link and then gets taken to another page or site with no content; this usually happens because there is no longer anything relevant on the original page they were trying to access. You can check your broken links with Broken Link Finder

If someone lands on one of these pages, they will see something like this:

Error

  • HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

Fix Crawl Errors

Fixing crawl errors is one of the most common ways to improve your crawl budget. Many factors cause crawl errors, and selecting them can significantly affect your site speed index scores.

However, fixing these errors isn't always easy—there's no magic bullet solution that will fix everything at once! It may take multiple attempts to find what works best for your site's layout.

Avoid Having Too Many Redirects

Redirects are one of the most common elements of a website's architecture. They help users navigate to different pages. And they can be used to fix broken links, change the URL of a page, or even redirect visitors from one domain name to another--all without needing any additional scripting or programming knowledge.

Some people might think that redirects are something only web developers should worry about; however, they're essential for everyone who interacts with your content online. 

Make Sure that you Have No Hacked Pages

The first step in optimizing your crawl budget is ensuring you have no hacked pages. An attacker has altered a hacked page to redirect visitors away from your site and onto another site.

To check for this behaviour, you can use the Crawlability Checker by ETTVI. You should also look at your website's analytics data to see if there are any spikes in traffic during certain times of day or weekdays versus weekends. Hackers often target websites with malicious links and code embedded into sites via redirects triggered by external factors like weather conditions or political events overseas, where people are more likely to explore new things online than usual.

Improve your Website's Reputation (External links)

You can improve your website's reputation by ensuring it does not link to spammy or poorly-reputable sites.

Here are some things to look out for:

  • Spammy links from known spammers. These include sites like dl.freeleech[dot]org, 1fichier[dot]com, mediafire[dot]com and depositfiles[dot]. If you see many of these in your crawl budget report, you may have a problem with your site being linked to by someone who doesn't have good intentions or established domain authority.

  • Malware-infested pages and websites (eBay is an example). Make sure that all links coming from within certain URLs are safe; they should never be redirected back into another URL unless it's being clicked on by users themselves (i.e., not just through automatic redirects)

Conclusion

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As with technical SEO, you are optimizing your crawl budget to benefit your SEO. The more usable and accessible your website is, the better it will be for your crawl budget, users, and SEO. Although every little step helps SEO, getting rid of crawling and indexing errors is the most important step in crawl budget optimization. If you fix these errors, you will contribute to the overall health of your website. By understanding the crawl budget and how it is calculated, you can decide better what to index and when. You can also use this information as a way of determining whether or not certain pages should be indexed at all. 

Qasim Agha Khan
limkedin

Qasim Agha Khan

Qasim Agha Khan is a seasoned SEO consultant and digital entrepreneur with over a decade of experience helping businesses improve their online visibility and drive organic traffic. He is also the author of the bestselling book '10 Minutes SEO,' a comprehensive guide to mastering search engine optimization strategies in a concise and actionable manner. .

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