Crawl budget is a very important SEO concept that is often overlooked.
Marketers have so many varied tasks to perform that optimizing the crawl budget is often forgotten.
In short, the crawl budget can, and should, be optimized for your SEO.
What is crawl budget in SEO
Crawl budget is simply how often search engine bots crawl pages on your domain.
This frequency is conceptualized as a balance between Google Bot’s attempts not to saturate your server and the need for Google Bots to crawl your site to always provide up-to-date information.
Optimizing the crawl budget is just a series of steps you can take to increase the speed at which search engine bots visit your pages and also increase the number of pages crawled each day.
The more robots visit your site, the faster they access the index and the pages will be updated. (and ranking)
As a result, your optimization efforts will take less time to take hold and begin to affect your ranking.
Now we will review 5 techniques to optimize your crawl budget.
1. Allow your pages to be crawled in the robots.txt file
This is obvious and a natural first step, the most important.
Managing the robots.txt file can be done by hand or using a website audit tool such as Yoast SEO.
I prefer to use a tool whenever possible. This is one of those cases where a tool is simply more convenient and more efficient.
Simply add your robots.txt file to the tool of your choice which will allow you to authorize/block the crawling of a page in your domain in seconds.
2. HTTP Errors
For simplicity, pages 404 and 410 are a drain on your crawl budget.
And on top of that, your UX will be very impacted.
This is exactly why Fixing 4xx and 5xx errors is truly a win-win situation.
In this case, once again, I recommend that you go through an SEO audit tool, or through specialist players like Zaacom, specialized in natural referencing.
3. Beware of redirect chains
Reaching the level of 0 redirections on your site is impossible missionwe are well aware of this.
However, we advise you avoid redirection chains as much as possible which brutally affect the health of your natural referencing.
For what ?
Simply because Google could stop crawling your site because of this, and never index the desired page.
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4. Update your sitemap.xml
Again, it’s truly a win-win to take care of your XML sitemap.
Google robots will find all the URLs to index much more easily and will not waste crawl budget on useless pages.
Only use canonical URLs for your sitemap.
5. Log analysis
A step that seems technical but which has become more popular in recent years thanks to tools such as Seolyzer and which allows you to understand how Google crawls your site.
For example, you can see the number of hits per day and per month on each of your pages.
You will also detect pages that are unknown to you, and which are nevertheless crawled by Google and therefore waste your crawl budget.
You can then block crawling on these pages and optimize the spending of your budget!
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