Crawlers are the different crawlers that Google uses to find and analyze all existing web pages on the network. The ultimate goal is to assign them a position after user searches.
Each of these crawlers focuses on a different type of information, as seen in this article by Google itself, where the different existing crawlers are listed.
The crawl budget is one of these crawlers whose function is to assign the time that Google will dedicate to analyzing each website.
If you already know the crawl budget and want to learn more about SEO, you can read our blog.
What parameters is the crawl budget based on?
The point is that Google doesn’t spend the same amount of time crawling pages but instead assigns them more or less crawl budget time based on various factors, including:
- page authority
- Content quality and update frequency
- Accessibility
- Structure
- upload speed
- Navigation fluency
- absence of errors
Is the crawl budget important for SEO?
Yes, since if Google does not assign a crawl budget to all the links on our site, some of them will likely not be visited by the search engine’s crawlers as often as they should.
What consequences can it have for our website or blog with less crawl budget time assigned? This is bad news for our site since it may receive less organic traffic. It is not positioned as it should be in some of the keywords users use to search for what they are interested in.
If, for example, we are updating our finance blog with interesting articles on the latest changes in accounting regulations, but Google robots do not go through our website with the appropriate frequency, our work will not get all the fruit it deserves since Google will not timely record these updates to our content.
Goal: improve crawl frequency
Now that we know that Google has crawlers called crawl budget, with the function of determining how often they should go through our page, we must try to increase the crawl frequency.
How do we do it? Trying to convince the crawl budget that our website deserves that the crawlers dedicate part of their valuable time to it because it has sufficient quality and interest and can provide added value to users.
The keys for Google crawlers to visit our site more frequently are:
- Create quality content and, above all, update.
- Take care of the architecture of our page, creating and frequently updating sitemaps.
- Fix errors like duplicate URLs or broken or missing links. To remedy these problems, which are very negative for the user’s browsing experience and penalized by Google, we can use 301 and 302 redirects.
- Try to increase the number of external links, especially from quality pages, pointing to our page. In this way, we will improve our site’s level of authority, and Google will consider that it should give us more tracking time.
- We must also optimize the internal linking of our page as much as possible. We have to use the robots.txt tag (which tells the crawlers which page to go through) only on those pages that we are most interested in being indexed by Google and visited by users.
The crawl budget perfectly exemplifies how much Google’s sometimes seemingly limitless resources go when it comes to crawling every URL in the blogosphere. There are crawlers specialized in the analysis and weighting of the different elements of the web that influence its final positioning: goals, images, and architecture.
No matter how small, there is no detail that Google spiders cannot reach. We must not relax or leave anything to chance in SEO without properly optimizing.
What did you think of this article? Has it helped you clarify the concept of crawl budget and understand it in the global context of SEO? If you have been interested, we recommend reading other entries on SEO from our Online Marketing Dictionary: