The crawl budget refers to the allocation of resources by search engine bots to scan websites. Since search engines do not have unlimited resources, crawl budget optimization is actually a practice carried out to reduce the crawl cost for search engines. The crawl budget is directly related to the technical condition of websites. With the right detections and moves, optimizing the crawl budget is quite easy. You can find answers to your questions such as what is a crawl budget and how it is calculated by examining the headings below.
There are many aspects to consider when optimizing your crawl budget. Especially, the following items should be focused on during optimization:
As seen, there are many different factors to focus on when optimizing your crawl budget. If seeing your website being crawled too little by search engine bots is a problem for you, being crawled too much should also be a concern. If you notice sudden spikes or drops in your crawl statistics, you should definitely examine your website in light of these items.
Many different factors determine the crawl budget of websites. While some of these factors are directly related to technical issues, others are related to traffic and freshness. You can view the factors that determine the crawl budget by examining the headings below.
If you frequently update the content on your website or regularly share new content, search engine bots will tend to crawl your website more regularly and more often.
Search engine bots tend to crawl more popular content on the internet. That means if your pages, categories, or content have high traffic, search engine bots will crawl your website more often.
One of the most important building blocks of SEO work, backlinks, when relevant sites link to your website, search engine bots will follow these links and crawl your website as well.
The fundamental algorithms of search engine bots aim to minimize the time and cost spent on Crawl. That means if search engine bots frequently encounter status codes like 3xx, 4xx, and 5xx on a website, there will be a noticeable decrease in the Crawl Budget allocated to your site.
Very slow-loading and large-sized pages are not a standard for search engine bots. If a search engine bot enters your website to crawl a page and cannot load and view the content within a certain time, it will abandon the crawl.
By calculating the crawl budget, you can find out whether search engine bots can scan your website healthily and carry out the necessary optimizations accordingly.
Although search engine bots have a certain Crawl Budget for each site, remember that daily crawl rates can change minimally. If you encounter very sudden increases or decreases in crawls, you must technically check your website.
To calculate your crawl budget, you first need to log in to Google Search Console.
After obtaining the total number of indexed pages and daily crawl statistics, you should perform a simple calculation.
For example, let’s assume that 1000 of our pages are indexed and search engine bots visit our website 300 times a day. If we divide the number of indexed pages by our daily crawl data, we get a result of 1000 / 3 = 3.3. If you reach an average number between 1 and 8 as a result of this operation, you generally do not need to worry about the crawl budget. However, if you reach an average number of 8 or higher, it means that search engine bots are not crawling your website enough, and it is an important sign that you need to start optimization work quickly.