What is crawl budget

The Crawl Budget is the maximum number of pages of your website that a Google‘s robot can explore in a given time. Google calculates the crawl budget of a site based on many criteria. For example, the loading speed of the site, its size. Also its health, or the quality of content and the frequency of their update. Here are some pointers on what crawl budget is and how to consider it in your SEO strategy.

Loading site speed

This criterion is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects that a crawler takes into account to determine its rate of passage on a website. It is the time taken by the hosting server to respond to the request of the user. On this point, Google gives more credit to sites that have an optimal display time. The maximum being 3 seconds. In the eyes of its algorithm, a platform that displays very quickly offers a good user experience and deserves to be better crawled.

Indexation quality

In order for the robots to spend as much time as possible on your strategic pages, think of taking care of the indexing of your site. Therefore, use a Googlebot emulator. I.e. a tool that crawls your site in the same way as Google robots and builds complete reports on your indexation. The most important pages of the site, those that are supposed to receive the most traffic, should be at the top of the site’s architecture.

Duplicate content

In some cases, URLs can be completely unique without query parameters and return the same content. This will also have a negative effect on the budget. Considering this, limit duplicate content because it can hurt your crawl budget.

Site updates frequency

If you suddenly stop updating your site, the bots will continue to visit it but will not notice any update during their visits. After several unsuccessful visits, they will get into the habit of crawling your site less often. On the other hand, the regular refreshment of the content can somehow boost the crawl of your site on this page.

Mobile First

It is important to compare the passage of the Googlebot dedicated to mobile with that dedicated to desktop. A single motto, more than ever: think Mobile First.

When learning about Google crawl budget, remember: you should always think about the optimization of your web pages.