For those, who are unfamiliar with the concept, a crawl budget is a frequency with which the crawlers of the search engine go over the contents of your website to enable them to be indexed and ranked. Optimizing crawl budgets refers to the process by which, you can boost the frequency of crawler visits to your website so that the page indexing is done more quickly and you start deriving the benefits of your SEO efforts.
Even though it is a vital aspect of SEO, the crawl budget often gets neglected because the SEO practitioner has too many things on his plate. While it is natural to think that a higher frequency is advisable, the process also slows down the site, which may not be what the business managers would want.
Reasons
Why the Crawl Budget Is Often Ignored
Perhaps the biggest reason why the crawl budget is one of the most neglected SEO activities is that crawling is not a direct ranking factor as Google itself has clarified. With this being made clear, it is generally enough for most SEO professionals to stop thinking about it.
However, the fact is that the crawl budget makes sense for very large websites that have millions of pages; however, it is not something to concern yourself if you have a mid-size website. The fact that you have millions of pages on your website is also a good indicator that you should trim it down to a more manageable size.
However, as people who are familiar with SEO know that you cannot get the results you want just by changing one factor. Effective SEO involves looking at dozens of metrics, which may need incremental changes, and it is the job of the SEO manager to ensure that all these changes are optimized to the extent possible.
In this context, the observation by Google’s John Mueller should be kept in mind that while the crawl index may not be a significant factor by itself, it does lend itself to superior conversions and better health of the website.
Important
Aspects of Optimizing the Crawl Budget
Permit robots.txt to crawl the most important website pages
This is perhaps the most fundamental step in optimizing the crawl budget. The management of robots.txt can be done manually, or you could use a website auditing tool. Normally, using the auditing tool is more convenient, simple, and effective.
All you need to do is to select the auditing tool of your choice and add the robots.txt file to it so permit or even block the crawling of your web pages. Thereafter, all you need to do is to upload the edited document and you are good to go.
It is evident that this also can be done manually; however, when you are handling really large websites where repeated corrections may be needed, a tool represents the easier way out.
Spot the redirect chains
Under ideal circumstances, you should take care to avoid the occurrence of even a single redirect chain on your domain, however, when the website has a large number of pages, it is inescapable, and you are bound to have a situation where there are – 301 and 302 redirects.
The problem is that if there are a large number of these redirects bunched together it can hurt the ability of the search engines to crawl your website. This may be even to the extent that the crawl may just be completely stalled, as the crawlers may not be able to cut through the maze of redirects and reach the pages that need to be indexed.
While a few redirects will not cause too much damage, it is always a good policy to eliminate them for improved SEO, observes an Atomic Design SEO consultant.
Use HTML as much as possible
The reason why it is better to use HTML is that even though Google’s crawlers can now crawl JavaScript and have gotten better at handling Flash and XML, other search engines have yet to catch up.
To ensure that you do not spoil your chances with any search engine crawler, it is better to stick to HTML that is universally accepted.
Do not allow HTTP errors hurt your crawl budget: It is an accepted fact that 404 and 410 pages have a negative impact on your crawl budget and on top of that, they also spoil the UX.
This is the reason why you must take care to set right all 4xx and 5xx status codes. While it is possible to undertake a manual process, using a website audit tool is far more convenient.
Pay attention to your URL parameters
SEO practitioners always need to remember that individual URLs are considered as separate pages by search engine crawlers and the larger the number of URLs, the more the wastage of your crawl budget.
The best way of preserving your crawl budget is to inform Google regarding the URL parameters. The bonus is that this step will also avoid concerns about duplicate content.
By taking care to ensure that the XML sitemap is updated with the latest information, you will facilitate the task of the search engine bots as they endeavor to understand where the internal links point.
It is a good practice to use only canonical URLs for your sitemap and also make sure that it matches the latest robots.txt version uploaded to the web.
Analyze your localized pages with hreflang tags
Search engine crawlers use hreflang tags to analyze pages with localized information. Effective SEO comprises keeping Google informed about the localized versions of your web pages as explicitly as possible.
The best way of doing this is to use the <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”lang_code” href=”url_of_page” /> in the header section of the web page, where the supported languages are represented by the “lang_code”. To be able to point to the localized page versions, you should always use the <loc> element for the specified URL.
The bottom line
All
SEO practitioners who have so far ignored the optimization crawl budget will
now know the different reasons why it is important. They will also know the
various tactics by which the optimization can be achieved helping the search
engine crawlers to crawl the web pages without interruption and index them for
best rankings.