Crawl budget is the number of pages that a search engine’s crawler like Googlebot, will crawl on a website within a specific timeframe. This concept is important because it influences how effectively a site’s content can be indexed and ranked in search results. Several factors determine a site’s crawl budget, including its size, the frequency of updates to its content, and the overall health of its technical infrastructure. Websites with high-quality content that is regularly updated are often favoured by crawlers.
Optimising for crawl budget ensures that important pages are easily accessible while minimising unnecessary duplication or irrelevant content that could waste crawler resources. Techniques include creating an XML sitemap to guide crawlers directly to key pages and using robots.txt files to instruct crawlers on which parts of the site should not be indexed.
A well-managed crawl budget ensures that search engines can efficiently discover and index valuable content, which enhances visibility in search results. It’s more important for larger websites where multiple pages exist. Without proper management, some essential pages might remain unindexed due to resource limits by the crawler.
