Crawl Budget
What is a crawl budget? Why crawl budget necessary?
The attention given to a website by search engines over a specific period of time is what we call the Crawl Budget. It is essentially a set of URLs’s Googlebots want to crawl on a site. In simple terms, Crawl Budget is how often google crawls on your site with How often it wants. Or demands from your site/
Why does the crawl budget matter?
If Googlebot keeps looking at low-value or duplicate pages then it may take longer for it to find and re-crawl your important pages. Large, complicated websites – for example, e-commerce catalogues, news publishers, or sites with a lot of thin or paginated pages – are the ones that can be severely impacted by this issue.
What affects crawl budget?
Crawl capacity/server health: if the servers are slow or return errors then the amount of data fetched by Google will be reduced.
Crawl demand/interest: pages with more inbound links, fresh content or higher user value are the ones that get priority.
Duplicate & low-value pages: a large number of near-duplicates, faceted URLs, or thin pages that intend to waste budget.
Internal linking and sitemaps: proper linking and correct sitemaps help the crawlers to find the most valuable content.
How is crawl budget calculated?
Google considers crawl budget as one of the elements that determine crawl capacity (the number of requests your server can handle) and crawl demand (how much Google wants to revisit pages). Actually, Google balances these two things to figure out the URLs to fetch and the time.
How can I know the frequency of Google crawling my site?
You can find that out through the Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console and by looking at server logs. These show the counts of requests, the response codes, and the availability issues that were detected when Googlebot crawled your site.
Is crawl budget important for small websites or blogs?
In most cases, the answer is no. Small sites which are made up of a few hundred pages are very unlikely to face crawl-budget limitations. The problem become so large that it is only significant for huge sites that have thousands or millions of URLs.