If you’re trying to increase your website visibility and index more pages of your site, you need to know how to manage your Google Crawl budget efficiently.
Your crawl budget dictates how many pages Google’s web crawlers, known as ‘Googlebot’, can crawl within a specific timeframe.
While it’s often overlooked in SEO, efficiently managing your Google crawl budget can improve your indexability and increase the number of pages Google’s crawl bots can crawl within a given time.
Keep reading, as over the next few minutes, we’ll help you understand how Googlebot works and provide some simple ways to increase your crawl budget and search engine visibility. 👇
What is your Google Crawl Budget?
Before we dive into the optimisations that can help you increase your Google crawl budget, let’s first look at what a crawl budget is.
Around 255,000 websites are created every day. That’s tens of millions of new web pages that search engines like Google have to find, understand, and know what to do with.
This is way too much for a team of people to manage, so Google uses web crawlers to regularly crawl websites, find new and understand new pages, and determine whether the pages belong in Google’s Search index.
Google uses algorithms to power their web crawlers, such as Googlebot, which follow various logical rules and paths when finding and indexing web pages.
We don’t know exactly what these algorithms are, as Google likes to keep their cards quite close to their chest when it comes to their indexing and ranking systems. That said, Google provides clear guidance and best practices for effective crawl management.
Now, let’s look at the optimisations you can make to increase your Google crawl budget based on Google’s best practice guidance and some of the strategies that our SEO specialists use on our client projects.
1. Create clear website and internal linking structures.
Structure is everything.
If your website structure is messy and confusing, Googlebot will find it hard to understand what your website is about, the hierarchy of different pages, and what pages to index.
Here are a few ways to improve your website structure through page hierarchy, XML sitemaps, and clear internal linking.
Clear Hierarchy
Creating a clear and logical page hierarchy will help Googlebot quickly navigate your website and discover and index your content more efficiently
To create a clear hierarchy, you need to:
- Use a logical, descriptive URL structure (e.g. www.example.com/products/electronics/laptops/)
- Limit click depth, keeping important content no more than three clicks away from the homepage
- Using a breadcrumb scheme markup and structured data to provide context to page hierarchy
- Properly configure paginated content to allow web crawlers to navigate pages easily
- Use rel=”next” and rel=”prev” for paginated content to help crawlers understand the relationship between different pages
Sitemaps
XML Sitemaps provide Google with a roadmap of your site, helping Google find all your pages and understand your page hierarchy.
You’ll need to regularly update your sitemaps to reflect changes on your website and submit the sitemap link through your Google Search Console account to ensure Google has the most recent version.
If your website is built on WordPress, you can use plugins that automatically generate and submit sitemaps when you publish a new page, set up redirects, or change the overall structure of your website.
Internal Links
Googlebot also uses internal links in your website’s navigation, page content, buttons, and footer to discover new pages and understand their position in the site hierarchy.
Although it seems like a small part of your website, getting your internal linking structure right is hugely important for your overall SEO health.
Here are some best practices to follow for your internal linking structure:
- Link to relevant pages in your content and buttons
- Use descriptive anchor text to give Googlebot more context
- Maintain a shallow click depth (no more than three clicks from the homepage)
- Use breadcrumb navigation and links to provide a clear path to follow
- Ensure vital pages and links aren’t blocked by Robots.txt or NoIndex tags
2. Optimising your crawl efficiency.
With a limited crawl budget, you need to be efficient and avoid waste where possible.
Here are a few ways to be efficient with your Google crawl budget and other things to be aware of.
Robots.txt
A robots.txt file gives Googlebot instructions on which pages they can access and crawl and which ones they can’t.
Not every page on your website needs to be crawled and indexed, like admin login and policy pages. Adding these pages to your robots.txt file means you’re not wasting your Google crawl budget on pages you don’t want to be indexed.
Noindex Tags
Similar to the robots.txt file, noindex meta tags tell Googlebot that you don’t want specific content, such as thank you pages and other non-essential content, to be indexed.
These tags are a good option if you still want Google to crawl content that helps it understand your website but don’t want those pages indexed on Google Search.
Although pages with noindex tags are still being crawled, the process is quicker than indexable pages.
If you’re trying to conserve your Google crawl budget, you should use the robots.txt approach instead of using no index tags.
Managing URL Parameters & Canonical Tags
Duplicate content is a big issue with SEO performance and a major cause of waste Google crawl budgets.
Although duplicate content is something to avoid, on some websites, like ecommerce stores, for example, it’s hard to avoid.
These sites tend to use parameterised URLs on product pages that change as customers select different product options, e.g.:
- https://examle.com/en-gb/used-vehicles/motorcycles.html
- https://examle.com/en-gb/used-vehicles/motorcycles.html?EngineSize=50cc
- https://examle.com/en-gb/used-vehicles/motorcycles.html?EngineSize=50cc&colour=Black
These URLs represent a single page, but web crawlers see three pages with the same content.
Crawling each page wastes your crawl budget and leaves the web crawler struggling to know which page to index.
Adding a canonical tag to the original page URL tells Google which version of the page you want them to index, helping you conserve your Google crawl budget and follow duplicate content best practices.
You can check Google Search Console to see if your site has URL parameters or duplicate content issues.
Need help to improve your website’s indexability?
Our SEO specialists can audit your website to find and fix any major issues and errors that could be impacting your Google crawl budget, indexability, and overall SEO performance.
3. Improve your page load speeds.
Fast page loading speeds are great for your SEO and UX and allow web crawlers to find and crawl pages more quickly.
Below are a few ways to improve your page loading speed, but for more information, check out our full blog post on page speeds and their wider impact on your website.
Optimise Images
Filling pages with multiple images and large file sizes can slow your site down.
Always compress and resize images before uploading them to your website to keep load times to a minimum. Aim for a maximum image file size of 100kb. Some of your images may need to be bigger than this, but this is a good size to aim for.
Also, remember to use file formats like .WebP to compress your images without losing image quality.
Minimise Complex Code
Code bloat is a big contributor to slow page speeds.
Reducing the amount of overly complex or unnecessary code in your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files will reduce the amount of data that needs to be loaded when a user or web crawlers access a page, helping to speed up your website.
Reduce Redirects
Each redirect on your website creates additional HTTP requests, which can slow down your website and waste your crawl budget, as Googlebot has to load each request.
Try to limit the number of redirects on your website by only redirecting pages when necessary, using the correct type of redirect, and monitoring the number of hits your redirects get.
WordPress plugins like Rank Math SEO allow you to monitor how often each website redirect is triggered. If you notice any redirects that haven’t been triggered for a long time, say a few months or a year, then you should be able to remove that redirect.
4. Regularly update your content.
Regularly publishing new pages, posting new blog posts, and updating existing content signals to Google that your website is active and should be crawled more frequently.
Here are a few ways to keep sending these fresh content signals to Google.
Regularly Publish Fresh Content
Regularly publishing new pages and blog posts helps attract more visitors to your website and keeps Googlebot coming back to crawl new pages.
Just make sure to follow Google’s helpful content best practices and E-E-A-T guidelines. If your content lacks detail or helpfulness or is hard to understand, Googlebot will be less likely to index pages and may not crawl your website as frequently as you need.
Updated or Remove Outdated Content
Over time, some pages or posts on your website will become outdated, and if you don’t update these pages, Googlebot will think your website is inactive and will crawl it less frequently.
It’s a good idea to review your content every few months to update pages with thin content or outdated information. This will keep your website relevant and helpful to users and encourage web crawlers to return to your site regularly.
If you have any content that can’t be updated or is now completely irrelevant, you should remove it (with proper redirects if needed) to avoid wasting your Google crawl budget on old and outdated pages.
5. Monitor and fix crawl errors.
Crawl errors, such as dead pages and redirect loops, can make it impossible for web crawlers to find, access, and understand your page.
Here’s how you can monitor and fix crawl errors on your website.
Check Google Search Console Regularly
If your website is connected to a Google Search Console account, you can regularly check your site data and reports for 404 errors, server errors and any other issues that might prevent Googlebot from crawling your pages.
You can also use other SEO tools, like Semrush or Screaming Frog, to run daily, weekly, or monthly website audits and automatically find these errors.
Always Fix 404 Errors Quickly
Finding 404 errors and other crawling issues is one thing, but you need to fix these issues quickly by redirecting to relevant pages to avoid impacting your wider SEO and wasting your Google crawl budget.
6. Increase your website authority.
Websites with higher authority scores often get a larger Google crawl budget and are crawled frequently.
Here are two ways you can increase your website authority.
Build Quality Backlinks
Create a backlink strategy to help you acquire high-quality backlinks from reputable sites in your industry. This helps drive website traffic and signals to Google that your site is trustworthy and valuable.
A word of caution: avoid buying links or using link farms. These practices go against Google’s guidelines and could result in penalties and a reduced crawl budget.
Keep Content to a High Quality
To maintain your authority score, ensure your website content is valuable and engaging, following Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) guidelines.
Keeping your content quality high can help you attract more organic links and encourage users to spend more time on your site, signalling to Google that your content is helpful and worth crawling more often.
7. Enhance your mobile usability.
Over the last few years, Google has shifted their focus to mobile-first indexing. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it might not get crawled as often and likely won’t be indexed.
Here are a few tips on ensuring your website is mobile-friendly and easy to use.
Mobile-Friendly Design
Ensuring your website has a mobile-responsive design is essential.
Creating a user-centric design that works quickly and seamlessly across mobile and desktop and optimising images, buttons, and menus for mobile users can help you improve your crawl efficiency and positively impact your SEO.
Avoid hiding important content from mobile users, as this can have a big impact on your SEO and the context given to web crawlers. Only hide non-essential elements that don’t aren’t vital to your user experience or SEO, like pop-up banners and less important buttons or forms.
Create Accelerated Mobile Pages
If your page loading speeds are slow on mobile devices, you can create Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) to fix this.
These pages are essentially stripped-out versions of the pages you would see on desktop devices, with non-essential elements like background images, buttons, etc.
Pages with just the essential content, images, links, and branding can load much quicker, which is great for optimising your crawl efficiency.
8. Optimise your server performance.
When web crawlers access your website, they rely on your server performance to find and crawl pages quickly and easily.
If your server is slow or regularly becomes overwhelmed with requests, resulting in internal server errors (error code 500), Googlebot will have a hard time crawling your website.
Here are two things you can look at to improve your server performance.
Choose a Reliable Host
When choosing a hosting provider, always look into their server reliability and performance.
You need a hosting provider with fast response times and minimal downtime to maintain a good user experience, optimise your SEO performance, and improve your crawl efficiency.
If you’re in the UK, we recommend using a hosting provider like Guru, which has flexible hosting options and reliable support teams. If you run into issues, you can fix them promptly. Generally, though, AWS (Amazon Web Services) is the best in its class for web hosting.
Improve Your Server Response Time
Optimise server response time to ensure quick access to your pages. A faster server allows search bots to crawl more pages within your Google crawl budget.
A few of the tactics we’ve discussed already, like fixing 404 errors, reducing code bloat, and minimising HTTP requests, can all help to improve server response times.
Other areas you may need to consider are using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to optimise the load times of images, videos, and JavaScript and optimising your website’s database to ensure the server can access your site’s content and settings quickly.
9. Implement detailed structured data.
Structured data, also called schema markup, is often forgotten about in SEO.
Adding schema markup to your pages gives search engines more context about your pages, and Google often uses this data to display more information to their users in Google Search.
Giving this additional context also helps web crawlers like Googlebot understand your website more quickly, which can increase your crawl frequency.
To wrap up.
Maximising your Google crawl budget involves a multifaceted approach to optimising your site structure, page load speed, content, mobile usability, and more.
For the most part, though, if you’re already following SEO best practices and Google’s guidelines for helpful content, you’ll already be taking big steps towards improving your Google crawl budget and efficiency.
It’s always important to remember that search engines are becoming increasingly people-focused. Google doesn’t want to see a website built perfectly for web crawlers or beat its algorithms, their focus is on helping people find the most accurate and helpful information as quickly as possible.
If you focus on optimising your website for people rather than search engines, you’ll likely notice a big improvement in your indexability, search visibility, and website traffic.
Got a question about Google crawl budgets and indexability? Visit our contact page to submit it via our contact form or drop our SEO specialists an email.
