What is Crawl Budget and Its Impact on SEO?

Crawl budget is one of the important things that website owners often overlook. In fact, if someone pays attention to crawl budget, the website they own cannot be optimized to the maximum.

Even all the strategies that have been done by the optimizer will be in vain, because if there are web pages that are not indexed, this will have an impact on SERP ranking. Eventually, the SERP ranking will continue to decline.

What is Crawl Budget?

Actually, crawl budget is the absorption budget of URLs that can and want to be crawled by Googlebot. In detail, crawl budget is the number of pages indexed and crawled by Googlebot on a website within a certain period of time.

Simply put, if you manage a website with 100 pages, those pages will be crawled and indexed by Google. Basically, crawl budget is a formula of 2 things:

Crawl Demand

This formula is the demand for the number of indexing and is influenced by the popularity of the site. Of course, the more popular the site, the more it will be crawled.

Crawl Rate Limit

Meanwhile, crawl rate limit is the maximum amount of data access on a website. So, the site will not be slow due to too many visitors.

Why is Crawl Budget Important for SEO?

Crawl budget is one of the important things for SEO. This is because SEO itself is a process to make the site indexed and obtain the best page ranking on SERP.

The search engine's working process consists of 3 stages, namely crawling, then indexing, and the last is serving. So, the first step that the search engine will do is crawling.

If there is no crawling process, there will be no indexing, and eventually your site will not get ranked in the search engine. When the site does not appear in search engines like Google, it indicates that the site will not get traffic.

However, as we know, traffic is an indicator of the success of the SEO process. Therefore, crawl budget is very important in the SEO process.

Especially if the site is a large-scale site, publishes content regularly every day, and has too many redirects. Crawl budget becomes a mandatory thing to do.

Read also: What are Core Web Vitals and Their Impact on SEO

Various Factors that Can Affect Crawl Budget

To make the crawl budget more efficient, you need to pay attention to several things, such as:

Faceted Navigation

When shopping online, you often see navigation menus on the left side. In the menu, there are options or filters that can be selected to speed up the search.

These filters are called faceted navigation. Actually, faceted navigation is very good for providing a good search experience for users. Unfortunately, faceted navigation is not friendly to bot crawlers.

This is because faceted navigation can produce many URL combinations and duplicate content. With these combinations and duplicate content, the crawl budget can become less efficient and more wasteful.

Infinity Spaces

The meaning of infinity spaces is spaces that have no limits. Infinity spaces are a large number of links, but there is no new content to be indexed by Googlebot.

If this happens on your website, the URL absorption process will consume unnecessary bandwidth, making Googlebot unable to index important content on the site. In the end, this crawling process becomes less efficient and less effective.

Site Hacked

If a well-managed site can make the crawl budget in vain, especially with a site that has been hacked. The site can become more damaged and not comply with Google's guidelines.

A hacked site allows others to access files from the website without permission from the owner. To prevent hacking, increase site security and don't forget to do weekly backups.

Soft Error Pages

Here, soft error pages refer to soft 404. This happens when the website server responds with an HTTP 200 code for empty pages.

Soft errors limit the crawling coverage in search engines. Instead of leaving it as it is, it's better to use a 404 not found code so that search engines know that the URL does not exist.

Indeed, websites are unlimited, but the time available to bot crawlers is very limited. Therefore, fix this status thoroughly.

Low-Quality Content

Many SEO practitioners consider low-quality content as content with little text in the body tag. However, this is not always the case because there are topics with little text that are not necessarily low quality.

The length of the text depends on the visitor's intent and the type of query. So, long text content does not guarantee quality, but how the content answers what the website visitor is looking for.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content in a website, whether mostly or partially, should be avoided. Google also recommends paying attention to this.

If ignored, this can have negative impacts such as lowering the popularity of URLs, important pages being missed in crawling, and displaying unwanted pages in SERP.

How to Implement Crawl Budget

To implement crawl budget, here are steps that can be taken, including:

Monitor Site Crawling Status

If you want to implement crawl budget, make sure to monitor the site. You can log in to GSC, then select settings and crawl stats. There, you can see available reports ranging from total crawl requests, average response time, and more.

Improve Site Speed

With a fast website, this can increase the number of URLs that can be crawled by Googlebot. So, make sure the website can load very quickly.

Remove Various Duplicate Content

When implementing crawl budget, prioritize important pages to be indexed, such as product pages, pillar articles, and others. Immediately remove content that has no value or is duplicate. Also, make sure to publish quality content.

Block Unwanted Crawling

If there are some pages that visitors are looking for, but you don't want search engines to index and display them in search results, block the URLs.

After knowing the ins and outs of crawl budget and its importance in SEO strategies, you definitely want to implement it right away. However, implementing crawl budget is not as easy as it seems.

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