How to Optimize Crawl Budget?

What Does Crawl Budget Really Mean?

The number of pages that search engine spiders (such as Googlebot) will crawl and index on your site in a certain time period is called "Crawling Budget". Google's resources are not endless; If your site's infrastructure is slow and you insert bots into unnecessary pages, you will see that bots do not visit your most profitable categories that need to be indexed.

Cancer Cells Consuming Screening Budget

Some technical debris on your site traps spiders and steals valuable time:

• Unnecessary Filter and Parameter URLs (/category?sorting=cheap): Dynamic URL parameters on e-commerce sites create tens of thousands of duplicate pages for Googlebot.
• Long Redirect Chains: If one URL redirects to another with a 301 code, and that in turn redirects to another, the bot stops crawling at the 3rd step and exits the site.
• Low Speed and High Server Response Time (TTFB): If your page takes 2 seconds to respond, Googlebot, which respects server limits, will reduce its capacity and leave your site.

Vital Solution Strategies

Use Robots.txt as a Weapon

Strictly block garbage directories that do not add value to the visitor but waste bots' time (for example /add-to-cart/ or /admin/) in your robots.txt file with Disallow: rules.

XML Sitemap Cleanup

Your sitemap should contain zero clutter. Put only 200 (Successful) response codes into the XML sitemap. Having 404 pages, redirected 301 pages or "noindex" tagged pages in the site map directly burns the crawling budget.