Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of attracting web traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search engine results. It sets out to improve a website’s position on search results pages. The idea is that the higher a website is listed, the more attention it will attract and the more popular it will be. In today’s digital age, SEO is considered an essential marketing activity. Good SEO involves several activities, including identifying relevant keywords, creating high-quality content optimized for search engines, placing quality, relevant reference links, and measuring results.
Search engines like Google use three basic steps to generate search results from web pages. Crawling, indexing and serving are the processes performed by the search engine to return relevant results for your search. The search engine uses web crawlers to access all publicly available web pages. The webpages are then analyzed or indexed as the information found on the site is stored by the search engine. With serving and ranking, the search engine presents users with the most relevant information from the index.
One of the more important parts of the entire process is crawling. This is when the search engine explores websites to check for information. Without crawling, the search engine couldn’t index content or rank pages. Let’s take a closer look at a crawl budget and the crawling process.
What is crawling?
As discussed, crawling is the first step in the process of returning internet search engine results. Search engines send out web crawlers to locate new pages and record information. You might also see these crawlers referred to as spiders or robots. The purpose of web crawlers is to discover newly created web pages and periodically check for updates or new content on previously visited pages. The process is carried out by following published links to web pages. If a homepage has links to several other pages, all of the links will be discovered and investigated when a crawler scans the homepage. Any links on subsequent pages will also be used to explore additional websites.
What is a crawl budget?
Because of the number of publicly available websites and the time it takes to analyze each site, Google and other search engines set a limit to how many sites they can crawl in a specific period of time. As a result, each website is assigned a crawl budget. Since web crawlers don’t have unlimited resources and have to search millions of websites, crawl budgets are a way to prioritize crawling efforts. Crawl budgets are important for SEO because if a search engine doesn’t index your page, it will not rank for anything. If the number of pages on your site exceeds your crawl budget, you will have pages that aren’t indexed.
Crawl budgets are assigned to each website based on the crawl limit and crawl demand. The crawl limit is an important part of the crawl budget. Crawlers are designed to prevent overloading a web server with requests. As a result, part f the crawl budget is based on how much crawling a website can handle and the owner’s preferences. Additionally, crawl demand is about determining the worth of recrawling URLs based on popularity and how often it’s updated. These two factors contribute to the crawl budget placed on each website.
In general, most sites don’t have to worry too much about crawl budgets because Google and other search engines are excellent at finding and indexing pages from various links. That being said, if you run a large site with 10,000 or more pages, you might face some difficulties with search engines finding them all. If you are concerned about your crawl budget, you can do things like reducing duplicate content, eliminating low-quality content, and fixing broken or incorrect links to help optimize your budget.
