To get excellent results in seo requires excellent knowledge of seo. It would be best if you gave equal focus on each part of the seo, whether it is on page, off page, or technical seo.
How Google Search Engine Works?
There are three levels by which your website content passes to appear in search engine result pages.
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Ranking
Everything must be excellently optimized. Likewise, a small factor needs a little more attention from every seo person or company, which is crawl budget. Do you know why it is a factor that needs your attention?
Excellent knowledge of seo can give your website great visibility in search engines. This underrated factor can bring your website from hero to zero in no time. Doing such optimization of a website crawl budget can make great utilization of google bots. Crawl budget optimization can put your seo to a new level.
The crawl budget concept is changing from time to time. It needs sharp eyes to track optimization related to crawl budget. You also keep yourself updated about changes in the past.
The best way to optimize your website crawl budget is to go with your website page speed and make its structure complex free. Doing this will help Google bots as well as users. If you have a massive amount of pages like 50,000 pages, then you need to stay alert about the crawl budget.
Google does not crawl all of your posts instantly. Crawling can take upto a week. You have faced this problem when you update your most important content, and that does not get crawled for a few days. Then this is the right time to do some magic with your optimization.
What do you mean by the crawl budget?
A program is created to collect data from millions of websites each day, so-called bots, spiders, crawlers. Crawl Budget is a term that means how many times a bot crawls your website content. It is the fusion of crawl demand & crawl rate limit.
It is the total number of posts or pages which will be crawled in a day. It can be a few pages/blogs, and It can be thousands of your website pages. This crawl budget is estimated by your website size and its overall health.
If you do some crawl budget optimization, this will increase the frequency of crawl bots to crawl your website content or pages.
If you have a small website, you don’t have to worry about this until you have a large website consisting of millions of urls.
Simple Explanation of Crawling Process
Crawling is started by automated software. The bots start to get massive amounts of websites to crawl and discover content from them.
How does crawler work?
A crawler has some set of websites or urls to crawl. It first searches for a website’s robots.txt for the set of permission so that they can crawl or act accordingly. As robots.txt contain permission, which url or part is allowed to crawl or which is not allowed to touch.
They first start from a url and then crawl links which they encounter while crawling a page or its content.
Crawler got more attention to sites that are new and updating their content frequently and also looking for dead-end links. It is already fixed how much to crawl, which website to crawl, and how many posts will be crawled from a website.
How to check your website crawl stats?
You can easily view your website crawl stats and check what’s going on with your website if your website has any problem.
For that, you have to setup google search console to research it. If you have not yet setup the search console, go and set up.
If you have already done that, then proceed further by opening the search console and clicking on Legacy Tools and Reports from the left side of the panel. Then click on Crawl Stats.
You will see three different graphs showing something up and down.
The first graph you see is giving information about how much of your pages are crawled each day.
The graph contains only 90 days of data. On the right side, you will also see Terms like Highest, Average & Lowest.
This means that on a day, the highest pages crawled are the numbers shown here. Same in case of average and lowest.
Then the second graph shows you how much of your website is crawled in terms of Kilobytes.
The last graph shows how much time is taken to crawl your website urls in milliseconds.
Why is it necessary in seo?
Many seo experts think this is not a very important topic. But this is also an important part, same as content quality and creating backlinks.
Crawlers jump from one link to other links to discover website content and crawl more and more. For that, internal linking is an essential part of getting well crawling.
Sometimes crawling can be disturbed by the hosting you have taken, like bandwidth quality, speed, and resources. It is not necessary that the bot will crawl every url and links. To get your url crawled, you need to optimize your crawl budget.
Supreme ideas to do the crawl budget optimization
Check Your Server Log File
The server log is a file that stores all types of traffic to your website. All data is stored in text format on your server. Every action is maintained in the log file, whether requesting resources, page requests, or bots accessing urls.
So, it’s like an entry-exit diary of your website. When Google bots enter and exit, a record is created in the log file.
You can quickly check the log file to verify all the details related to your website.
Analyzing Log file will give you details.
● Which page is not getting crawled?
● Crawl budget spending efficiently?
● Which is the topmost crawled page?
● Error found during crawling?
Optimize XML Sitemaps
Suppose you want to optimize your crawl budget. In that case, you need to focus on every small and large parameter which can influence crawling. XML sitemap optimization is also on the list.
You can organize your sitemap by creating multiple sitemaps according to business or services. It can reduce the crawling process of your website.
Always keep your xml sitemap updated. Don’t neglect to make a request when you make some changes to your website.
Do Necessary Robots.txt Optimization
To keep your crawling process simple, don’t block something most important for your websites, like some CSS file, some javascript files, or a single page. You have the right to block or allow something that you don’t want to show in google search result pages. You can read here the advanced setting for robots.txt.
Improvement in Website Speed
A great website must have a high opening rate. You can check your website speed in google page insight. Then you can make the necessary improvement, which is suggested for your website. Many of the websites contain deprecated sets of codes that are old now. That can be replaced with a set of new and improved performance to enhance website speed.
Removing unused resources and extra CSS can also improve website speed. Using compressed images can also lead to website speed improvement.
These improvements can optimize your website crawl budget easily.
Duplicate Content Reduction
If your website contains lots of duplicate content or plagiarized content, then crawlers will not crawl or even index your content. So always try to post exclusive & plagiarism free content. Always avoid low-quality content, as it can degrade your website performance and visibility too.
Google always looks for fresh and unique content. Try to use canonical tags for your content and use no-index or no-follow where it is required. Using canonicalization will give google bots about which of the content is your original page. Use of canonicalization can prevent your content from stealing your content.
Website Architecture Simplification
Simpler the site, more comfortable to use. Your website structure must be so simple and free from any complexity to use, and easy to navigate from one page to another. Use more straightforward tags that are easy to memorize and recall. Organize your website content and pages in a hierarchy.
Improve Internal Linking
Linking is a great way to communicate one page to another. If not done, this will lead to an orphan page if not linked well. Link your content from one to another where it is possible. Linking also helps crawlers to find more content on your website.
Orphan Page Reduction
Some time crawlers do not reach a page because of a simple reason that is linking. An orphan page is created when the page does not contain any incoming or outgoing link. Such pages or posts are tough to find by crawlers. Due to such pages, crawl budgets get imbalanced.
Clean-Up Redirect Chains
When you have a large website that contains numerous urls, when crawler hits a redirect url, it is put in the next crawling list. Like you have a website that is redirected from http to https and then non-www to www, this will take so much time to reach the destination url. If crawlers found such types of url in large amounts, it will delay your crawling rate. Try to fix them before they create any problem for your website.
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If you think this content helps you to improve your crawl budget. Then don’t forget to comment and share it with your friends who need it.
I have been checking my crawl budget for the last 3 months, google just crawled my site once in this 3 months, I have done a lot of changes but I don’t know that is wrong with it.
Everything that is mentioned here as “crawl budget optimization” sounds more like regular SEO to me.
Do page load time and click depth affect the crawl budget?