What is Crawl Budget?

The term crawl budget refers to how many pages the web crawlers, like Googlebot, will crawl from your website in a specific period. It’s calculated based on two key aspects: crawl rate limit and crawl demand.

The crawl rate limit refers to the highest number of parallel connections that a crawler uses to access resources from your website. Crawl demand refers to the rank and relevance of pages on your website.

Knowing your crawl budget and managing it effectively allows search engines to focus on crawling and indexing the most relevant pages of your website, which ensures the freshness and relevance of your content in search engines.

Why Is Crawl Budget Important?

Crawl budget matters for three reasons:

1. Efficient Indexing

With an effective crawl budget, search engines learn to prioritize indexing the most valuable pages on your website, which ensures the freshness of your content in search engines and leads to sufficient visibility and high rankings for these pages.

2. Improved SEO Performance

A page that isn’t crawled and indexed will never show up in search results, which hurts your SEO performance. So, the best way to keep getting those high rankings is to make sure that the most important pages get crawled frequently.

3. Resource Allocation

Effective crawl budget management for large websites with thousands of pages prevents search bot crawlers from wasting valuable resources on crawling unimportant pages, giving more resources to the pages that matter.

4. Site Health Monitoring

Effective crawl budget management allows you to detect problems like broken links, duplicate content, slow pages, and more that need to be fixed to enhance your website’s performance and across-the-board user experience.

How Does Google Determine the Crawl Budget?

There are two components that determine the crawl budget of any website – the crawl rate limit and the crawl demand. The crawl budget is not statically divided into these two components.

Google mixes these two in a way that it can dynamically assign the crawl budget in the best way possible.

For example, if there are many links on the page but the crawl rate limit of the page is high, then Google may crawl all the links on the page and then decide which pages to index.

This process ensures that the most valuable content gets crawled and indexed first.

1. Crawl Rate Limit

This limits the number of requests Googlebot makes to a site at any given time. The setting is based on your server’s capacity and performance.

If your server has enough performance and returns requests quickly — with little or no error — then the limit can be increased.

Conversely, if the server is slow or frequently returns errors, the crawl rate limit will decrease to avoid overloading the server.

2. Crawl Demand

This refers to the interest Google has in your pages, influenced by factors such as the popularity and freshness of content. Pages that are updated frequently or have high user engagement are more likely to be crawled often.

Additionally, pages that are new or have gained significant external backlinks may also have higher crawl demand.

How Does the Crawling Process Work?

The crawling process involves several steps to ensure that search engines effectively discover and index your site’s content:

  • Discovery: Search engines use various methods to discover new URLs, including following links from other websites, sitemaps submitted by site owners, and URL submissions through tools like Google Search Console.
  • Crawling: Once a URL is discovered, the search engine’s spider visits the page and fetches its content. During this process, the spider follows internal links to discover other pages within the site.
  • Parsing: The fetched content is then parsed to extract information about the page, such as text, images, meta tags, and links. This allows search engines to understand the context and relevancy of the content.
  • Indexing: After parsing, the content is indexed and stored in the search engine’s database. Indexed pages are then evaluated and ranked based on relevance, quality, and other ranking factors.
  • Refreshing: Search engines periodically revisit pages to check for updates or changes. The frequency of these visits depends on the page’s importance, the rate at which it changes, and the crawl budget allocated to the site.