In the article “An Ultimate Guide to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)” we introduce crawling. This article on the smart strategy blog discusses what a crawl budget is, the importance of a crawl budget for SEO, and how to increase it. So join us at the end of the article.

What is a Crawl Budget?

The crawl Budget is the number of pages that Google crawls and indexes over time.

Why is a crawl budget important for SEO?

In short: if Google does not index a page, then it is impossible to rank that page for any keywords. So if you have more pages than your site’s Crawl Budget, you will have pages on your site that are not indexed. That said, Google is good at finding and indexing pages, and there is no need to worry about the crawl budget.

But there are a few things to keep in mind:

  • You have a large site

If you have a site (like a store site) with more than 10,000 pages, Google may have trouble finding all the pages.

  • You’ve added a bunch of content to your site.

If you’ve recently added a new section with hundreds of pages to your site, you should know that you have a creepy budget to get them all indexed quickly.

  • Many redirects

Many redirects and redirect chains destroy your Crawl Budget.

 

How to increase the site crawl budget?

Here are some simple ways to maximize your site’s Crawl Budget:

  • Improve site speed

Improving site optimization, especially site speed, can increase the number of crawls of your site URLs by Google bots. Google says: “Improving the loading speed of the site causes a better user experience and at the same time increases the crawl rate.” in other words: The slow loading speed of the site consumes valuable Googlebot time. But if your pages load quickly, Google’s crawler has time to view and index more pages.

improve speed for maximize crawl budget | smart strategy

 

  • Use internal linking

The Google crawl prioritizes indexed pages with many external links and internal links. And in this case, the internal link is of crucial value. Your internal links will send Googlebot to the various pages of your site that you want to be indexed.

internal linking for crawling
internal linking for crawling

  • Flat site architecture

According to Google: “URLs that are more popular on the Internet are usually crawled more to stay in the results.” So in the world of Google, popularity = means creating backlinks with high authority.

That’s why you need to create a site with flat architecture. A flat architecture allows the authority to be transferred to all site pages.

flat site architecture
flat site architecture

  • Avoid “Orphan Pages”

Orphan pages are pages to which no internal or external links are preferred. Unfortunately, Google has a hard time finding orphan pages. So if you want to get the most out of your Crawl Budget, ensure there is at least one internal or external link to each page on your site.

orphan pages in crawling

  • Limit duplicate content

Duplicate content on the site should be controlled for many reasons. First, content duplication hurts your site crawling. This is because Google does not want to waste resources indexing multiple pages with the same content. So make sure that 100% of your site pages are composed of unique and quality content. This is not easy for a site with more than 10,000 pages. But if you want to get the most out of your Crawl Budget, this is a must-have.

 

Conclusion

 

In this article on smart strategy, we thoroughly explain what a crawl budget is and why it is essential for SEO. To ensure the correctness of your website performance, you can contact us or send your request from the smart strategy SEO services. 

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