The web is a transfinite space. It is incredibly large and just like the universe, it is continually expanding. Search engine crawlers are constantly discovering and indexing content, but they can’t find every single content update or new post in every single crawling attempt. This places a limit on the amount of attention and crawling that can occur on a single website. This limit is what is referred to as a crawl budget.
The crawl budget is the amount of resources that search engines like Google, Bing or Yandex have allocated to extracting information from a server at a given time period, but it is determined by three other components which are;
- Crawl rate: The amount of bytes that the search engine crawlers is downloading per unit time
- Crawl demand: The crawl necessity due to how frequently new information or updates appears on a website
- Server resilience: The amount of crawler traffic that a server can respond to without a significant dip in its performance
Why did I list those three components above? I listed them because the crawl budget is not fixed. It can rise and fall for a website, and it’s rise and fall affect the ranking and visibility of all content that the website holds.
So what are ranking the implications? you may wonder. The SEO implications of crawl budget changes are profound for many reasons, some of which are;
Large crawl budgets increase the ease with which your content can be found, indexed and ranked
The only content that can be indexed is content that can be found, hence the more quickly your content can be found, the more competitive you become in expanding your keyword relevance relative to your competitors. It is only content that is found that can be ranked so when the news breaks, the site with a larger crawl budget is likely to be ranked higher than others because its content gets out there first.
Crawl budget increases lead to resilience against the impact of content theft
The more crawl budget a site possesses, the greater the likelihood of its being able to get away with content theft, content spinning, and the more immune it becomes to the harmful effects of content scraping. This is because a site with a large crawl budget can steal content, but may get this content discovered and indexed before the original website.
Lastly, search engines compare websites based on their crawl budget rank
This is why related information is explicitly available in search console and Yandex SQI reports. The crawl budget rank or CBR of a website is given as:
- IS – the number of indexed websites in the sitemap
- NIS – the number of websites sent in the sitemap
- IPOS – the number of indexed pages outside sitemap
- SNI – the number of pages scanned but not yet indexed
The closer the CBR is to zero, the more work needs to be done on the site, the farther it is from zero, the more crawling, visibility and traffic the site gets.
How to increase your crawl budget
You can increase your crawl budget by increasing the distance that a web crawler can comfortably travel as it wriggles through your website. There are six major ways by which it can be accomplished and these are;
- This can be achieved by eliminating duplicate pages
- Eliminating 404 and other status code errors
- Reducing the number of redirects and redirect chains
- Improving the amount of internal linking between your pages and shrinking your site depth (number of clicks needed to reach any page in your site)
- Improving your site speed
- Improving your server uptime
- Using robot.txt files to block crawler access to unimportant pages on your site
Conclusion
Crawl budget optimization is one of the surest paths to upgrading your rankings and website visibility, this is why special attention should be paid to your overall site health. Your site health is the most reliable indicator of the scale and location of your crawl budget leakages