How to optimize the crawl budget for your website

Crawl budget is important for SEO. Understanding the crawl budget allows web resource owners and developers to maximize the indexation of important pages. 

What is a crawl budget 

Crawl budget is a limited resource that search engines allocate for indexing pages when their bots crawl them. If many optimized pages of your site are not indexed, you can’t talk about effective website promotion. At the same time, the better the site is, the more attention the robots pay to it, which is why SEO promotion is necessary. 

Crawl budget is distributed automatically. The volume is different for each site, it can be, for example, 100 pages per day. For effective search engine promotion of a large online store, such a crawl budget will not be enough. 

A properly allocated crawl budget is an important component of a successful online website promotion strategy. It helps to improve indexation, increase visibility and organic traffic. Improper management of the crawl budget will cause search robots to spend a significant part of their budget on indexing unimportant or duplicate pages instead of focusing on key content.

How to check the website’s crawl budget

To do this, follow these steps: 

1. Open the Search Console and select your site.
2. In the left menu at the bottom, click on Settings. 
3. In the pop-up window in the Crawl block with stats, click the Open Report button.

You will see the number of scan requests, the total size of downloads, the average response time, and a dynamic graph by date and metrics. The statistics also show the distribution of crawl requests by response, file type, purpose, and Googlebot type. There are many types of robots, including:  

• Smartphone crawls pages for mobile devices.
• Desktop analyzes pages designed for PCs and laptops.
• Image crawls data for Google Images and the products that use them.
• AdsBot analyzes pages to ensure compliance with Google Ads rules.
• GoogleOther is used by teams working on various products to extract publicly available content from websites.

Analyze and optimize your website’s crawl budget

Data on the distribution of crawl requests provides valuable information about how Googlebot crawls your site. You can use these results to optimize your crawl budget. Here’s what crawl request distribution points mean: 

• File received (200). The crawl request was successfully executed and Googlebot was able to access the corresponding file or page.
• Moved permanently (status code 301). Indicates that the page has been moved to a new URL. To fix it, check if 301 redirects to new pages are configured correctly and make sure they lead to the correct addresses.
• Not found (404). The server cannot find the resource. Numerous such errors indicate that Googlebot is wasting time crawling pages that don’t exist. You have to find and fix all 404 errors to direct Googlebot to index only useful pages.
• Temporarily moved (302). The resource is temporarily available at a different URI, and you should use the old URI in case of repeated requests.
• Unauthorized request (401 or 407). The server cannot process the request without authentication. You need to add the Authorization field to the request headers or check the correctness of the data in this field if it is already present.
• Other client errors (4XX). It can indicate various errors. You need to check and fix problems with client requests.
• Server error (5XX). The page was unavailable due to a server error. You need to check and fix the problem.
• DNS error. It indicates a problem with domain name resolution, so you need to check and fix the DNS settings.
• Webpage is not available. The page is not accessible to Googlebot. Check the page availability and fix the errors.
• Robots.txt not found. Indicates that the robots.txt file is not available for Googlebot. Check the settings of the robots.txt file and fix access issues.
• Timeout expired. Check your server’s response speed and optimize it.

Additional optimization tips

Crawl optimization involves several actions that are performed when promoting a website:

1. Increasing load speed.
2. Adjusting the re-linking.
3. Improving the structure.
4. Closing some pages from indexing (pages of the site under development, copies of the site, unnecessary documents, etc.).
5. Updating content.

Conclusions

Crawl budget is an important aspect of website optimization. Effective management allows you to optimize the indexing process. 

This material was prepared by specialists of the digital agency Lanet CLICK, which, in particular, offers SEO services.