You may have heard of a crawl budget before, but many people don’t really know what it is, why it’s important, or how crawl budget optimisation works. So, to ensure you’re fully clued up, here’s everything you need to know about crawl budgets.
What is a Crawl Budget?
In SEO, a crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine bot will visit and process on a website within a certain timeframe. Since there are billions of websites out there, discovering and indexing every single piece of content is pretty much impossible. So, to ensure they can crawl as much useful content as possible, they allocate resources carefully.
Because of this, your crawl budget is influenced by two things:
- Crawl rate limit – how much your server can handle without slowing down
- Crawl demand – how interested search engines are in your content
Google vs Bing Crawl Budgets
Both major search engines use crawl budgets, but their approaches are slightly different.
Google Crawl Budgets
Google’s crawling system is very well documented and much more widely discussed within the SEO community. Google crawlers work by allocating a budget based on the popularity of your site, the freshness of your content, and your server health.
If your site is frequently updated and has strong engagement levels, Google is more likely to increase your crawl budget. On the flip side, if your site has slow response times, numerous errors, and outdated content, Google may reduce crawling.
Bing Crawl Budgets
Bing works based on a similar principle, but uses different tools and signals. It relies heavily on sitemaps and internal linking for crawling, and tends to be more conservative with its budget – especially when a site shows inconsistent performance or has unclear structure. If your site is poorly organised, there will be a noticeable impact on Bing crawling.
When to Worry About Crawl Budget
Most smaller websites don’t need to think about crawl budget optimisation at all, as search engines can easily crawl all available pages. However, larger sites with extensive archives or eCommerce sites with thousands of product pages may need to take action to ensure important pages are crawled regularly and visibility in the search results is maintained.
You only need to be concerned if:
- Important pages aren’t being indexed or updated in the search results
- Crawl reports are showing a high number of excluded or ignored URLs
- Bots are spending too much time on irrelevant or duplicate pages
- New content takes a long time to appear in the search results
Crawl Budget Optimisation
When it comes to crawl budget optimisation, it’s all about ensuring the right pages are crawled. Here are a few things you need to do:
Limit Low Value URLs
You don’t want to waste crawl budget on duplicate content, outdated pages, or parameter URLs. You should use canonical tags and robots.txt files where necessary to keep crawlers away from these low-value pages.
Improve Site Structure and Utilise Sitemaps
Clear internal linking makes it easier for search engines to navigate your site efficiently and XML sitemaps can help Bing and Google crawlers prioritise important pages. Sitemaps are especially important for Bing, as crawlers rely heavily on this file to discover and index new pages.
Prioritise Server Performance
If your site is slow or has numerous errors, crawlers may reduce their activity. Keeping your loading times fast and addressing 404s and redirect chains is essential for efficient crawl budgets.
Don’t Overlook Content Quality
Search engines, especially Google, are becoming more and more selective about what gets crawled and indexed. Poorly written pages that don’t offer much value to users are less likely to be prioritised, while regularly updated, useful content should encourage more frequent crawling.
Google’s Reduced Crawl Limit
It’s also important to note that Google did recently reduce its crawl limit. Googlebot’s crawl limit is down from 15 MB to 2 MB, meaning it now only processes the first 2 MB of text, HTML, and CSS files.
This means it’s even more important to ensure essential content appears early in the HTML, not at the bottom, and keeping file sizes to a minimum.
Crawl Budgets Are All About Efficiency
When it comes to crawl budget optimisation, it’s all about efficiency. You’re trying to encourage Bing and Google crawlers to crawl smarter, so your site is crawled more effectively, indexed properly, and ultimately ensure you perform better in search.
While crawl budget optimisation isn’t something to worry about if you’re a small site, if you’re a larger publisher or eCommerce site, keeping an eye on your crawl budget is essential for maintaining visibility online.
