What is the Crawl Budget and How to Optimize it to Improve your Web Ranking?
Today we are going to talk about one of the most popular SEO factors today to position a website on Google. Consult “Best SEO Companies in Dubai” if you want to position your website on google or visit “SEO Company in Dubai” if you want to learn about it accurately.
This concept has increased its notoriety, mainly due to the low-quality infoxication currently available on the net. You can join “SEO Forums” to keep yourself updated about current popular SEO factors.
Every day thousands and thousands of pages and content are uploaded to the web. For this reason, it is increasingly difficult for Google to track to classify all this content properly.
For this reason, the famous search engine has chosen the Crawl Budget, among many other SEO factors, to differentiate which websites offer quality content and which do not.
Visit “Digitalmarketing” to get more information about Crawl Budget or consult “SEO Specialist” if you want to know how it works.
As we will see below, the tracking budget will be entirely related to the optimization of our website load (WPO), so surely, there will be times when both areas converge simultaneously.
What is the Crawl Budget?
The Crawl Budget is the tracking budget that Google assigns to our website.
That is, it is the time that Googlebot will crawl our website based on our popularity and its SEO optimization.
This tracking budget is assigned by Google internally based on a series of parameters such as:
- Our position in searches
- The frequency with which we publish our content
- The number of visits
However, this tracking time does not depend on us but on Google.
Therefore, the only thing we can do when the search engine crawls most of our website and holds us in high esteem is to make things easier for you so that you get the most information in the shortest time possible.
From this process the importance of the WPO in the Crawl Budget will come as we will see next.
What is the Relationship Between the Crawl Budget and the WPO?
The tracking budget that Google assigns to our site is limited, therefore we must facilitate this task to the MAXIMUM.
Imagine that the tracking budget that Google assigns to your website is 10,000ms and each page of your website takes 1,000ms to load since it is not optimized.
How Many Pages it Will Have Crawled?
Simple, 10,000/1,000 = 10 pages
Can you imagine how many pages it would have crawled if instead of taking 1,000ms per page it took 200ms?
Right, I would have crawled 50 pages!
Do you See How Important it is?
Logically this data is not real, it is only a simulation, but the really important thing about this is, you should understand that the higher the WPO, the more information Google will receive.
Logically, if your website is a small site or a personal blog, this factor will not be as relevant as on a website of a certain caliber.
Therefore, if your website is a portal of a certain size, you will have to optimize the WPO of your website as much as possible .
How Can I Know If My Website is Optimized for Googlebot?
There are several tools to know the loading speed of our website and, therefore, your load optimization (WPO).
Google itself offers you the possibility of knowing your optimization errors through its Page Speed Insight tool.
However, this SEO tool (very general) ends up falling short in terms of analytical data.
Therefore, to analyze the loading speed of a site I always recommend the Pingdom Website Speed Test tool.
Thanks to this tool you will know how long it takes to load each file on your web page from different servers, thus obtaining the most important data from this tool, the “Load Time” or time in seconds that it takes to load the URL completely.
Finally, Google, through its Search Console tool, allows us to know the tracking statistics of its bots on our website.
To do this, simply access your Search Console Panel and in the menu on the left click on “Tracking” and, later, on “Tracking statistics”.
- Crawled Pages: The higher this number the better it will mean better optimization of the Crawl Budget.
- Kylobytes Downloaded Per Day: The greater the number of kilobytes downloaded, the more information Google will collect (as long as we optimize WPO well).
- Download Time of a Page: It is the time that Google takes to load a specific page, the important thing is to reduce this metric to the maximum.
8 Tricks to Improve the Crawl Budget of your Website
Having seen what the tracking budget is and how you can improve it, it is time for you to get down to work and help, as much as possible, our great friend Google.
For this, we are going to see 8 simple tricks that will help you to improve your tracking budget.
Let’s go with it!
Use the Freshness Effect to your Advantage
The freshness is a concept based on SEO content updating continuously.
Google, upon detecting that said website updates its content on a regular basis, increases its tracking budget, since it understands that it is a live and useful website.
For this reason, many websites use tools that update the content of all their URLs automatically.
With this practice, webmasters manage to update all their content automatically with a simple post giving signs of freshness to Google.
Improve Web Architecture and Web Depth
There are numerous studies that affirm that 3 is the maximum number of clicks that a user should make within a site to get the exact information they need.
If this number is exceeded, the reader will most likely choose to leave the web for various reasons such as boredom, slow loading or complexity.
Therefore, applying this 3-click technique is essential when structuring your website and creating its categories.
Due to this fact, you must take into account the depth of your website.
That is, the number of levels or folders that the user will access to reach a specific page or URL.
The closer a post or HOME page is to your site, the better, since it will receive greater authority and will be more likely to be tracked by Google.
Opt for Long or Infinite Pages
As you have seen previously, the number of clicks and the depth of your website matters a lot.
For this reason, the pages are not more than an “obstacle” both for Google Spider (which have to follow a greater number of links), and for users who have to increase the number of clicks to get to the information.
As a consequence of this and the mobile first every day there are more blogs and e-commerce that opt for infinite scroll or pages of many entries (20 or more).
Completely Eliminate Binding Errors
Take care of every link that exists on your website.
That is, be careful when modifying or deleting your URLs and make sure that in case of modifying them you do the 3XX redirects correctly.
So continually check with Search Console the number of broken links to avoid this little bug as it can lead to serious SEO error in case the number of broken links is important.
Create an HTML Sitemap That Helps Google
You can create an HTML Sitemap that helps Google to track the most important URLs on your web page.
To do this, you can choose to install a wordpress plugin like WP Sitemap Page which will perform this task automatically or do it yourself using HTML.
The key to this type of map is that it helps Google to have a kind of “index” with the most important links on our website.
In order for Google to track this map as soon as possible, it is important that the link to this page can be found on as many pages as possible within the site.
For this reason, many webmasters choose to put it in all the footers of their website.
Do Not Follow Little Relevant Pages within your Site
It is very common to lose tracking budget with little relevant pages in the eyes of Google and the user.
For this reason, I always recommend the following: every time you create a page of the type legal notice, cookie policies etc, it uses the meta “no follow, no index”.
This will make Googlebot ignore these specific pages and spend time on other more important pages.
It is also very common for the legal notice, the cookie policy etc to be found in the footer and, therefore, on all the pages of the portal.
For this reason, I always recommend tagging these links with the rel = ”nofollow” attribute, since with this technique you will make Google not waste time following these unimportant links.
