SEO is a huge field with many myths surrounding it. Web crawl budget is one critical SEO part many people don’t understand properly hence the misinformation you see on the internet today. Many website owners know you shouldn’t waste your crawl budget if you want search engines to index your pages. So, what is it? Here, you’ll learn about crawl budget and some common myths on it. Keep reading.
What Is Web Crawl Budget in SEO?
Crawl budget is the amount of attention or number of pages Google crawls on your website daily. Your crawl budget might be as little as about 6 pages or can even be thousands. These three factors determine the exact number:
- The size of your website
- The number of errors Google encounters when crawling your site
- The number of sites linking to you
Web crawling allows Google to discover many pages on your website and index them, increasing the chances of ranking higher.
How Does It Work?
Googlebot (Google’s crawler) fetches URLs from your site and analyses them systematically. This crawler then checks your robots.txt file to ensure you still want it to crawl all URLs. Lastly, Googlebot collects some new URLs from your site that it plans to crawl the next day or after a certain time.
Common Myths
Below are the major myths about crawl budget and the facts to take note of:
You Can’t Boost Your Crawl Budget
Most people believe boosting the assigned web crawl budget is impossible. That you should be comfortable with your specific budget because you can’t do anything about it, which is false.
There are plenty of ways to optimize your crawl budget. You can use methods like website maintenance, blocking some parts of your site, getting more links, and reducing redirect chains to help minimize errors and make it faster to crawl your site. Making the work easier for Google raises the chances of getting more attention.
1. Every Site Should Worry About Crawl Budget
This is another common myth you might run on during your crawl budget research. Large sites have the most responsibilities when it comes to crawl budget because they contain thousands of pages they need crawled.
If you run a large website, then you most probably have more things to tweak to reduce errors and other critical issues that might affect your web crawl budget.
2. You Can’t Limit Your Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is good, but can be destructive. How is that? If Google crawls your site pages excessively, that might affect your servers negatively. If you feel like your site is a victim of unnecessary crawling, visit the Google search console where you can view and limit your web crawl budget to a level you see fit.
3. Crawl Frequency Is A Ranking Signal
The number of site owners who believe having a huge crawl frequency helps you rank highly is unimaginable. A high crawl frequency helps to appear on searches easily, but Google focuses on other ranking signals more to rank your website.
How Does Google Assign Crawl Budget?
There’s no sure method that Google uses to determine how much attention to give your site. However, here are the most common factors search engines consider:
- Relevance- Google is always on the lookout for new and quality content hence making it vital to update your content more to be crawled often.
- Popularity- Popular pages have a higher crawl budget compared to other sites.
Is Using Meta Robot tags and Canonical URL Necessary?
Yes. Using your canonical URL and meta robot tags allows you to send clear signals to Google, highlighting the exact pages you need indexed. However, that does not mean search engines won’t crawl your other pages.
Web crawl budget is a big term in the SEO industry that is easy to overlook. This article gives a clear web crawl budget definition, enlightens you on the common myths about this term you shouldn’t fall for and other vital details. Therefore, research more on web crawl budget to help you understand how to increase or reduce it significantly, so your crucial pages can always be indexed accordingly.
