All You Need to Know About Crawl Budget for SEO

Crawl budget is the number of web pages a search engine crawls and indexes at a set time. Two elements determine crawl budget: crawl demand and crawl capacity limit.

Googlebot sets a crawl capacity limit based on three factors: Google’s crawling limits, crawl health, and the limit a site owner set in Search Console. Given your website's quality, relevance, size, and update frequency, a search engine usually takes as much time to crawl it. So you have to maximize your crawling efficiency.

One way to do this is by removing duplicate content. Compress related entries into one page. This way, Googlebot can focus on crawling unique content instead of unique URLs.

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The following are more ways to maximize your crawling efficiency:

1. Categorize Your Products and Services 

If you want search engines to crawl all your essential pages and rank them, you need to clean and organize your website pages. Think of the most important message you want to convey to your target audience and design your website structure according to that. 

Consider the navigation flow through your pages. Organize your products or services according to categories. Dedicate one distinct style per page, and then include the available colors and sizes. 

Moreover, you have to compress image files and arrange them neatly on one page. Ensure that the product listing URL has a category and a location ID. This makes search engines’ jobs easier.

If this is too much for you to handle alone, you can contact a dependable Las Vegas SEO agency. A digital marketing expert can take charge of meeting the structured data requirements of Google and other search engines so that you can rank higher in search results.

2. Add Canonical Tags

Another way to maximize your crawling efficiency is to add canonical tags. Tell search engines which pages to crawl and which not to crawl. Search engines should not spend too much time crawling URLs inappropriate for indexing. 

Search engine crawlers can get lost on their way toward analyzing the bulk of your pages, especially if you have duplicate pages and redundant content. One way to help crawlers identify which ones are original is to add a canonical tag. 

This will signal the search engine to follow the original page and not the other one. It is best to remove duplicate pages, but just add a "no follow" tag if you can't. 

This way, you show the crawler which pages are worth its time and effort. Even if your website has few pages, it is still best to clean up your back-end tags. 

3. Schedule Featured Items per Day

If you have a huge ecommerce website and your products are hundreds every day, you have to select featured items for each day. If your featured products increase month by month, buy a dedicated server. 

That will help increase your site’s download speed. Also, search engines can crawl more pages in a shorter time, thus maximizing your crawling efficiency. 

Have a plan for the structure of your website, and schedule a featured page for the day. Implement an SEO campaign to optimize your featured page each day. 

Aside from the tags, you can also add internal links in your content to connect to your social media sites and other websites. You can ask relevant websites if you can guest-post and include links that point back to your website. This way, you can meet your crawl budget and increase your backlinks at the same time.

4. Remove 404 Dead Links 

Google has already been clear about requiring all website pages to be high-quality, productive, and interactive. If you have dead links, Google will not rank your website higher. Other search engines also want websites to have a continuous navigation flow through the pages to satisfy users. 

If you have many dead links, you risk decreasing your chances of reaching the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). Doing this SEO cleaning is a bit tedious, but you need to do it. 

You can also replace those dead links with 303 redirects or add new content so that they become live pages. 303 redirects do not harm SEO ranking. But eventually, you need to deal with them and either remove them entirely or add fresh content.  

5. Limit Redirect Links to Unavoidable Cases

Fixing all 404 dead links with 303 redirects can be tempting, but this will only make you lazy to add fresh content. Limit the number of redirect links to a minimum and write new content for the empty pages. Remember to update your sitemap and include the newly fixed pages. 

The sitemap serves as a summary report for Google and other search engines of which pages to index. Ensure that all pages are live. SEO seems like a household chore, but without SEO, how can you attract traffic to your sites and boost your sales? 

SEO remains a valuable arm in internet marketing. Because of it, you can keep connecting with other sites and communicating with your target market. Without SEO, your internet marketing remains stagnant. 

6. Create and Submit a Sitemap for Indexing

A sitemap lists all the website pages for indexing. Organize your sitemap in a way that shows the structure of your web pages and the hierarchy. Your sitemap can also contain “no follow” links that label duplicate pages to save on your crawl budget. 

Your sitemap helps search engines index your web pages properly. Ensure that your sitemap is clean, accurate, error-free, and updated. If you have a huge product listing every day for your ecommerce, you can feature several pages per day and update the sitemap daily. 

You can check and update your sitemap via the Webmaster Tool. To know how many pages Google is indexing from your website, you can use Google Search Console. You can also check your website performance via Google Analytics and see which keywords and channels yield high results for you. 

You need a holistic evaluation of your website so that you can assess which pages need more optimization and which products or services require more marketing efforts. 

Final Words

If your ecommerce business keeps on expanding year by year, it is about time to purchase a dedicated server for your website. It can increase the download speed and help you maximize your crawling efficiency. 

Do not waste your crawl budget by removing duplicate content and compressing related entries into one page. Also, ensure to scan through the pages and fix broken links. These are more ways you can make the most of your crawl budget and ensure that Googlebot crawls and indexes all critical pages.

Doing all this SEO work seems tedious, yet it is crucial to improving your online visibility. Consult Digital Authority Partners to help you with this so that you can attract more customers and grow your revenue.