If you’re a marketer or an SEO expert, then you probably already know: there are a few different types of SEO. The technical side of SEO, which includes tasks like optimizing images and canonicalization, is a little more, well, technical. It can be tedious, but it can also be interesting! If you care about improving your website’s search performance and how much money your site generates, then SEO is important. In this article, we’ll discuss one of the principles behind technical SEO: Google’s crawl budget and how it works.
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What is the Google Crawl Budget?
According to their website, Google’s goal is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Basically, Google crawls and organizes the more than 30 trillion web pages that are on the internet. You can think of it like a huge Rolodex. Like any other company, Google aims to give its customers the best possible experience.
That’s what the crawl budget is for. The Google crawl budget is the amount of time or number of pages that Google allocates to crawl the content of each website. One of the search engine’s major costs is the maintenance of its servers and the amount of bandwidth required to index the whole internet. This means that if your website is disorganized, Googlebot will crawl only some of your pages, give up, and decide to come back later.
However, if Googlebot can index your pages quicker and more efficiently than the pages of your competitors, they’re more likely to crawl your website again and again. If you are regularly uploading fresh content to your website, or adding features like a keyword map or recommendations from a technical audit, your SEO results will improve much faster.
How Often Does Google Crawl My Website?
Now, you’re probably wondering how often Google is crawling your website. You can check how often Google crawls your site in your Google Search Console, if you have an account. (If not, you should set one up.)
Here’s how you can check: go to the “Crawl” menu, and then “Crawl Stats.” The Google Search Console will show you a graph with the Googlebot activity over the last 90 days, and how many pages were crawled per day.
How Do I Get Google to Crawl My Site?
If you are not happy with how often Google is crawling your site, there are a few things you can do to encourage the search engine to swing by and crawl your pages. Here are some tips:
Site Speed
The faster Google is able to crawl your pages, the happier the search engine will be. Be sure that your site is quick and make sure to minimize any server errors, so Google won’t waste time looking for a page that isn’t there. (Improving your site speed also has major SEO and UX bonuses, too!)
Redirecting Dead Pages
It’s important to implement redirects from any dead pages to a new, relevant page. Most of your page authority from the former page will be passed along to the new one, and in addition to helping Google, it will also improve your user experience, too.
Follow Blog Best Practices
If your website has a blog or news section, you only need to index individual blog posts and the homepage of the blog or news section. It’s not necessary to index category and tag pages, because they don’t help searchers. Save your time and Google’s by noindexing any category, tag, or archive pages.
Remove Old Product Pages
Say for instance your company had a popular product that has since sold out. If you can’t delete the page entirely, make sure to add an noindex tag to that page so that Google will remove it from the search engine results pages. You don’t want searchers to land on a page with a sold-out product.
Block Duplicate Content
If you have pages of duplicate content for any reason on your website, make sure to noindex the duplicate page or block in the robots.txt. Google frowns upon duplicate content, whether it matches your site or another website. For example, maybe you copied and pasted instructions from a manufacturer’s website onto a page of your own site. Make sure to noindex the page with those copied and pasted instructions.
Sitemaps
Make sure you have a sitemap and that it’s up-to-date. It’s important to include key category and product pages into your sitemap to make sure they’re indexed. Also, declare your sitemap in your robots.txt, and submit them through the Google Search Console and Bing. Make sure that Google indexes the pages in your sitemaps without index bloat on the console’s dashboard.
Help Google Help You
The easier you make it for Google to crawl your website, the more Google will help you by improving your SEO ranking. Google is most concerned with providing an excellent user experience, so make sure to have an excellent user experience on your website.
For more help with SEO and helping Google crawl your website, contact SEO Design Chicago today! Our SEO experts can help improve your search ranking and your website.
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