What is crawl budget and why is it important for SEO?

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Google doesn't instantly crawl a page. It can take a day if you're lucky, but sometimes it can take weeks before they crawl your page. This can significantly hurt your SEO efforts so stay with us because in this post we'll talk about what crawl budget is and why it's important for SEO.

What is crawl budget?
The crawl budget is the number of pages Google will crawl on your website on a given day. This number varies from day to day - Google may crawl 6 pages on your website each day, 5,000 pages, or even 4,000,000 pages each day. The number of pages Google crawls, your "budget", is generally determined by the size of your website, its "health" (how many errors Google finds), and the number of links to your site.

Google determines the crawl budget by weighing the crawl rate limit and crawl demand.

Crawl rate limit : Your page load speed, crawl errors, and the crawl limit set in motorcycle owner email lists Google Search Console (website owners have the option to reduce Googlebot's crawling of their site ) can all affect your crawl rate limit.
google crawl rate

Crawl Demand : The popularity of your pages, as well as their freshness or age, can influence crawl demand.
Some of these factors are things that can be worked on, but we'll get into that a little later.

Why is crawl budget so important?
Search engines work through three main functions:

Crawling
Indexing
Ranking
What is search engine crawling?

Crawling is the discovery process where search engines send out a team of robots (known as crawlers or spiders) to find new and updated content. The content can vary (it can be a web page, an image, a video, a PDF, etc.) but regardless of the format, content is discovered through links.

What is a search engine index?

Search engines process and store the information they find in an index, a huge database of all the content they have discovered and deemed good enough to serve to search engines.

Search Engine Ranking

When someone performs a search, search engines scan their index for highly relevant content and then sort that content in hopes of solving the searcher's query.

This ordering of search results by relevance is known as ranking. In general, it can be assumed that the higher a website is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes that site to be for the query.

It is possible to block search engine crawlers from part or all of your site, or to instruct search engines not to store certain pages in their index.

While you may have reasons for wanting to do this, if you want your content to be found by search engines, you first need to make sure it is accessible to crawlers and indexable. Otherwise, it is as good as invisible.

Bottom line: If Google doesn't crawl or index a page, it won't rank anything.

So, back to crawling budget… if the number of pages exceeds your site’s crawl budget, you’ll have pages that won’t be indexed.

That said, the vast majority of sites out there don't need to worry too much about crawl budget. Google is really good at crawling, ranking, and indexing pages.

crawl budget

Of course, there are some cases in which you should pay attention to the crawl budget:

If you have a large site: If you have a website (such as an e-commerce site) with more than 10,000 pages, Google may have trouble finding them all.
You just added a bunch of pages – If you just added a new section to your site with hundreds of pages, you need to make sure you have the crawl budget to index them all quickly.
Too many redirects : Too many redirects and redirect chains eat up your crawl budget.