9 Tips To Optimize Crawl Budget for SEO

SEO

By Chris Barnhart Last updated Sep 10, 2024

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Crawl budget is a vital SEO concept for large websites with millions of pages or medium-sized websites with a few thousand pages that change daily.

An example of a website with millions of pages would be eBay.com, and websites with tens of thousands of pages that update frequently would be user reviews and rating websites similar to Gamespot.com.

There are so many tasks and issues an SEO expert has to consider that crawling is often put on the back burner.

But crawl budget can and should be optimized.

In this article, you will learn:

• How to improve your crawl budget along the way.
• Go over the changes to crawl budget as a concept in the last couple of years.

(Note: If you have a website with just a few hundred pages, and pages are not indexed, we recommend reading our article on common issues causing indexing problems, as it is certainly not because of crawl budget.)

What Is Crawl Budget?

Crawl budget refers to the number of pages that search engine crawlers (i.e., spiders and bots) visit within a certain timeframe.

There are certain considerations that go into crawl budget, such as a tentative balance between Googlebot’s attempts to not overload your server and Google’s overall desire to crawl your domain.

Crawl budget optimization is a series of steps you can take to increase efficiency and the rate at which search engines’ bots visit your pages.

Why Is Crawl Budget Optimization Important?

Crawling is the first step to appearing in search. Without being crawled, new pages and page updates won’t be added to search engine indexes.

The more often that crawlers visit your pages, the quicker updates and new pages appear in the index. Consequently, your optimization efforts will take less time to take hold and start affecting your rankings.

Google’s index contains hundreds of billions of pages and is growing each day. It costs search engines to crawl each URL, and with the growing number of websites, they want to reduce computational and storage costs by reducing the crawl rate and indexation of URLs.

There is also a growing urgency to reduce carbon emissions for climate change, and Google has a long-term strategy to improve sustainability and reduce carbon emissions.

These priorities could make it difficult for websites to be crawled effectively in the future. While crawl budget isn’t something you need to worry about with small websites with a few hundred pages, resource management becomes an important issue for massive websites. Optimizing crawl budget means having Google crawl your website by spending as few resources as possible.

So, let’s discuss how you can optimize your crawl budget in today’s world.

1. Disallow Crawling Of Action URLs In Robots.Txt

You may be surprised, but Google has confirmed that disallowing URLs will not affect your crawl budget. This means Google will still crawl your website at the same rate. So why do we discuss it here?

Well, if you disallow URLs that are not important, you basically tell Google to crawl useful parts of your website at a higher rate.

For example, if your website has an internal search feature with query parameters like /?q=google, Google will crawl these URLs if they are linked from somewhere.

Similarly, in an e-commerce site, you might have facet filters generating URLs like /?color=red&size=s.

These query string parameters can create an infinite number of unique URL combinations that Google may try to crawl.

Those URLs basically don’t have unique content and just filter the data you have, which is great for user experience but not for Googlebot.

Allowing Google to crawl these URLs wastes crawl budget and affects your website’s overall crawlability. By blocking them via robots.txt rules, Google will focus its crawl efforts on more useful pages on your site.

Here is how to block internal search, facets, or any URLs containing query strings via robots.txt:

Disallow: *?*s=*
Disallow: *?*color=*
Disallow: *?*size=*

Each rule disallows any URL containing the respective query parameter, regardless of other parameters that may be present.

• * (asterisk) matches any sequence of characters (including none).
• ? (Question Mark): Indicates the beginning of a query string.
• =*: Matches the = sign and any subsequent characters.

This approach helps avoid redundancy and ensures that URLs with these specific query parameters are blocked from being crawled by search engines.

Note, however, that this method ensures any URLs containing the indicated characters will be disallowed no matter where the characters appear. This can lead to unintended disallows. For example, query parameters containing a single character will disallow any URLs containing that character regardless of where it appears. If you disallow ‘s’, URLs containing ‘/?pages=2’ will be blocked because *?*s= matches also ‘?pages=’. If you want to disallow URLs with a specific single character, you can use a combination of rules:

Disallow: *?s=*
Disallow: *&s=*

The critical change is that there is no asterisk ‘*’ between the ‘?’ and ‘s’ characters. This method allows you to disallow specific exact ‘s’ parameters in URLs, but you’ll need to add each variation individually.

Apply these rules to your specific use cases for any URLs that don’t provide unique content. For example, in case you have wishlist buttons with “?add_to_wishlist=1” URLs, you need to disallow them by the rule: