What is Crawl Budget?

The goal of crawl budget optimization is to allow engines to see more useful pages during its crawls, so not to waste time on uninteresting URLs. Thus, the engine will detect additions and modifications made to the site more quickly, therefore allowing Google to be more responsive to the SEO optimizations that you implement.

Why optimize your crawl budget?

The meta description has no direct weight for SEO: this means that the keywords placed in the tag are not taken into account by Google as a direct criterion for the positioning of a web page.

However, it is worth taking great care in writing it because it plays a major role in deciding Google users to visit your site when browsing search results.

In fact, the description metadata simply refers to the text that appears below the blue link in search results.

People rely on the metadata description text to get an idea of ​​what's on the page, so it's crucial to optimize this metadata so that it makes people want to visit your content over your competitors'.

How to optimize your crawl budget?

Several factors can be addressed in order to optimize your crawl budget:

Avoid duplicate content

This is about minimizing the same content accessible via multiple URLs.

  • Duplication in HTTP and HTTPS;
  • Duplication with/without the www prefix;
  • Duplicate with/without uppercase characters in URL;
  • Duplicate with/without “/” at the end of URL;
  • Printable or PDF versions of pages;
  • Some parameterized URLs (use of filter in the URL);
  • Duplicate with a /index.html at the end of the URL;
  • URLs including only one image
  • …

Depending on the typology, it will be necessary to set up the necessary redirections, to put in noindex, to exclude via the robots.txt file and/or to no longer allow their generation or internal meshing towards these URLs.

Avoiding the presence of incorrect links

The presence of links in errors (404, 500, no response) or in redirects (301,302) will waste time for the engines, so it will be important to reduce their presence as much as possible. Also think about identifying and correcting redirection chains.

Avoid the presence of low-quality content

Identify empty or nearly empty pages and pages whose content does not allow you to attract traffic. Delete them and determine whether it is useful to reuse the content on another page of the same theme.

Perfecting your internal network:

  • Avoid pages that are too deep;
  • Link your pages together correctly.

In fact, the more quickly and easily a page is accessible in the structure of the site, the greater its probability of being crawled.

Perfecting its architecture and internal meshing

  • Bring important pages up in the site architecture;
  • Link pages that have common semantics between them.

Reduce the loading time of your pages

  • Minimize redirects;
  • Compress your images;
  • Compress your CSS and JavaScript files;
  • Improve server response times;
  • …