The concept of crawl budget revolves around the number of pages that Google crawls in a given period. It may be defined as the “attention allocation” that Google pays to your website. While the concept may not matter much if your website consists of a few pages, you may need it if your website has hundreds or even thousands of pages. Proper management of crawl budget ensures that Google does not take much time in finding the valuable pages of your website, but rather focuses on the pages that do not bring any value to your website or are repetitive. In this blog, we will discuss four advanced but easy-to-implement strategies to optimize your crawl budget. Each strategy is discussed in easy-to-understand language, complete with practical examples and tools (Google Search Console, as well as log file analyzers, such as Screaming Frog and JetOctopus). So, without further ado, let us get started!
1. Prune Low-Value Pages & Consolidate Content
The first thing you should do to optimize your crawl budget is to clean up non-value-generating pages. You can begin by performing a content audit to find pages with low quality or duplicated content, as these pages may take up Google’s crawl budget. For example, there may be old pages of products which are not currently available anymore or very thin blog posts getting low traffic. Such pages may affect your crawl budget optimization negatively since Googlebot crawls pages which do not contribute anything to your SEO.
How to improve crawl budget with pruning
To find unnecessary pages use Google Search Console (GSC) and check whether there are pages which are either indexed or excluded from indexing. With the help of the Coverage (Page Indexing) report in GSC, you can find pages that are crawled but not indexed (they are often low-quality or duplicate pages).
Also, a site crawler such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider will generate a list of all the URLs on your site for your further examination. After you have identified low-value pages, you can perform actions described below:
- Update or merge content: If the page contains outdated information but still remains relevant, you can update it or merge it with other content, thus making this page valuable again.
- Remove or no-index thin pages: If you have pages which do not have any purpose, like tag page without any posts or a duplicate printer-friendly version, it may be useful to remove such pages or add a noindex tag. Removing low-value content can seriously improve the quality of your website and help crawlers crawl through it more easily. However, do not forget to redirect any deleted pages via 301 redirects to any other page of your website (at least to the homepage) so that neither your users nor crawlers would encounter numerous 404 errors.
2. Strengthen Internal Linking & Site Structure
One of the ways to ensure your content will be discovered by Googlebot is proper internal linking. When your website is structured logically and pages are properly interlinked, crawlers are able to discover new and significant pages faster. Otherwise, the content that is hidden deeply inside your website (multiple clicks away from the homepage) or is isolated from other pages (orphan pages) will be overlooked or crawled less often.
The following tips will help improve internal linking and crawling efficiency:
Try to have a shallow structure of your website: The more clicks visitors or crawlers should take to reach your key pages from the homepage, the harder it would be for them to reach them. As a rule of thumb, try to have your key pages within a few clicks from your homepage. The three-clicks rule works perfectly here.
Create internal links from high authority pages: It is highly recommended to identify the pages of your website which get the most traffic or have some link equity (homepage, for instance, or very popular blog post). Then create links to the pages which you need to highlight using those high authority pages.
Find and fix your orphan pages: Make sure that all the pages that are important for you have at least one link from your website. To identify the pages without links, you can use any SEO crawling tool (for example, Screaming Frog or Sitebulb). Just adding a couple of links from related pages will allow Googlebot to find those orphan pages.
Anchors for internal linking: When creating internal links, use descriptive anchors (instead of “click here” use something like “women’s running shoes collection”). Not only will it increase relevancy, but will also allow Google to better understand what the linked page is about.
Properly built internal linking will guide Googlebot.
3. Enhance Your Site Speed and Resolve Technical Issues
Crawling your site more efficiently by optimizing your website can be highly beneficial. Bear in mind that Google’s robots spend limited time on your website and the more pages they crawl within that time, the higher chances that more pages will be indexed. Your website might be crawling slower and having some issues that prevent Googlebot from crawling your pages as fast as it could.
Increase your site speed: The faster website the Googlebot gets information about, the more pages it can access. Thus, by decreasing server response time and page load times you tell Google that it can safely crawl more. There are several ways to increase your website speed – turn on compressions, optimize your images, use browser caching and CDN. For example, compressing images and minimizing your code will decrease loading time of your pages greatly. Pro tip: You can find speed issues of your website using various online tools, like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. You should also look at your website average response time in Crawl Stats tab of Google Search Console – the lower it is, the better.
Fix broken links and redirect chains: When Googlebot finds broken links (404 errors) and goes through long chains of redirects it wastes its time. It is necessary to conduct site audit and fix broken links by updating them or redirecting to another working URL. You should also try to get rid of additional redirects – if your page A redirects to B, which redirects to C, try to make A redirect to C directly. Googlebot will spend less time following redirects. Site auditing can be done using various tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs. Google Search Console Coverage/Index report and Crawl Stats also show number of Not Found errors – try to minimize their number.
Use canonicals or noindex for duplicate content: Having too many duplicate or near duplicate pages (printer friendly pages, session ID URLs, faceted filters pages) can take away a lot of crawl budget and index nothing new. Thus, you should use canonical tag for pointing duplicate pages to the main version of the page. For example, example.com/product?color=red and example.com/product-red pages both contain same content – in this case you should put a canonical tag on one of them. Another way is to use noindex attribute on duplicate pages, that are not needed to be crawled and indexed (filtered pages, pagination). You should not include duplicate and parametrized URLs in your XML sitemap – only canonical URLs are required to be indexed.
By making your technical side work well you’ll make sure that Googlebot spends more time crawling your site instead of wasting it on issues.
4. Make the Most of Google Search Console & Log File Analysis
In case you want to become a pro in crawling budget optimization, then it is important for you to monitor how the crawlers behave on your website based on the collected data. This is where you need to use tools such as Google Search Console (GSC) and log files analysis. These will help you understand what exactly Googlebot does on your website.
Using Google Search Console:
Google Search Console is a completely free, intuitive tool that should be used by each and every website owner. There are a few aspects related to crawl budget that deserve special attention:
Crawl Stats Report: This report (available in Settings → Crawl stats in GSC) shows the number of requests made by Googlebot to your website per day, the amount of pages crawled, the average response time and whether there are any crawl errors. With its help, you will be able to track potential problems, such as a sudden decrease in the number of crawled pages or an increase in the amount of crawl errors.
URL Inspection Tool: It allows you to check whether a particular URL on your website is indexed, the time of the last crawl and whether there are any crawl or indexing issues. The perfect tool for testing some of the critical URLs. Should you have any critical pages that haven’t been crawled for months or have any crawl errors, you may ask for a recrawl using this feature. Don’t forget to submit XML Sitemap using GSC.
Using log file analyzers (advanced but powerful):
Each time the crawler scans your website, it creates a report in the form of a log file on your server. Log file analyzers such as Screaming Frog Log File Analyser or JetOctopus help to convert raw logs into readable reports. Such reports give you all the information about the URLs crawled by Googlebot (or any other bot) including their visit frequency and exact date of crawling. Using logs, you can detect certain patterns like Googlebot crawling the same irrelevant URLs over and over again (say, countless calendar URLs or session IDs), meaning crawl budget waste. Also, log analysis can uncover URLs of pages that are of high importance but Googlebot doesn’t seem to crawl them at all – the indication that you should work on their internal linking or sitemap inclusion. Thus, you may find out that Googlebot has crawled your /blog?page=2 URL 500 times last month (possibly an unnecessary crawl, as page 2 may be nonindexed) while crawling your latest product page twice. To solve the problem, you can block paginated URLs with robots.txt and increase internal links to your product page to make it crawled more often. Even if you’re a beginner, many of these tools offer user-friendly dashboards – and you can always start with GSC’s data before diving into logs.
Pro Tip: Develop a process of checking and correcting. For instance, once a month, analyze your Crawl Stats and correct any issues that may arise. Every three months, conduct a more extensive content audit in order to find out whether there are new low-quality pages that should not be indexed.
Conclusion
Crawl budget optimization, on the other hand, is all about letting Google find your high-quality content more quickly. Through the process of removing unnecessary webpages, improving your internal links, technical optimizations, and tracking your crawl data, you are sure to ensure Googlebot finds important webpages and indexes them quickly, thus improving your SEO efforts.
But what if you feel like it is too complicated? Do not worry – you do not have to go through this process on your own. With the assistance of our highly experienced team at DigiChefs, we will be able to optimize your website’s crawling and give you advice on how to proceed.
Are you looking for effective crawling solutions? Contact our team at DigiChefs today and get your crawl budget optimized!
