Overlooking your websites crawl budget can lead to Google not indexing some pages of your website, which can lead to a substantial loss in organic search traffic.

Google sends it’s bots regularly to crawl your website pages and index content. It is important to understand how search engines interact with your website, to make sure you maintain strong organic rankings, especially when working with larger websites.

In simple terms, crawling is Googlebot’s main job but the number of pages Google will crawl on your site on any given day is referred to as your crawl budget. This number varies slightly from day to day as the crawl rate can go up and down based on a couple of factors but generally stays relatively the same.

In more technical terms, Google tells us that crawl budget is derived from two key factors: The crawl rate and crawl demand. The crawl rate limit is where the Googlebot limits the maximum fetching rate for any given site. If the crawl rate limit isn’t reached and if there’s no demand from indexing, there will be low activity from Googlebot. This is known as crawl demand.

Hence, overlooking your websites crawl budget can lead to Google not indexing some pages of your website which can lead to a substantial loss in organic search traffic.

How Can You Begin Optimising Your Website’s Crawl Budget?

The key objective in optimising your website for crawl budget is to have Google stay on your site and have all pages indexed.

Unfortunately, there is no quick fix to increase or even decrease your website’s crawl budget however it is possible to optimise your website to give it a sufficient crawl budget by taking care of key factors. Here are some of FCDM’s recommended starting points:

Site Speed

Making sure that your website speed is good essentially improves the users experience while also increasing the crawl rate. So, ensuring that you have leveraged browser caching on your site, have enabled compression and have optimised your images is a great start, that gives our friendly Googlebot time to visit and index all of your pages.

Fix HTTP Errors

It is important to remember that error 404 and 410 pages can eat quickly into your crawl budget. These errors can affect the amount of time that Google stays on your site and it also creates a usability issues for your website visitors. So make sure that you are doing regular checks on your site for error pages will help to make that you website’s crawl budget is being used wisely.

Remove Duplicate Content

Google tries to index and show pages with unique content and information. Thus, having two URLs on your website with the same content can penalise your website ranking and use up more of your crawl budget. Making sure that each page on your website contains unique content to your business ensures that our friendly Googlebot’s spends the maximum time finding all of your great pages and indexes them quickly.

Do you need help with Optimising Your Website’s Crawl Budget?

We hope that our great tips will help you when optimising your website’s crawl budget and with driving your SEO performance. However, if you are operating a large website, then having an experienced team like FCDM keeping an eye on your crawl budget can he very helpful. If you are looking to partner with an experienced Digital Agency in Dublin, who are Google Accredited Partners we can help you! Contact our experienced team today to find out how FCDM can take your business to new heights!