Master Crawl Budget Optimization for Enterprise Websites

About this talk

For every website on the internet, Google has a fixed budget for how many pages their bots can and are willing to crawl. The internet is a big place, so Googlebot can only spend so much time crawling and indexing our websites. Crawl budget optimization is the process of ensuring that the right pages of our websites end up in Google’s index and are ultimately shown to searchers.

Google’s recommendations for optimizing crawl budget are rather limited, because Googlebot crawls through most websites without reaching its limit. But enterprise-level and ecommerce sites with thousands of landing pages are at risk of maxing out their budget. A 2018 study even found that Google’s crawlers failed to crawl over half of the webpages of larger sites in the experiment.

Influencing how crawl budget is spent can be a more difficult technical optimization for strategists to implement. But for enterprise-level and ecommerce sites, it’s worth the effort to maximize crawl budget where you can. With a few tweaks, site owners and SEO strategists can guide Googlebot to regularly crawl and index their best-performing pages.