Glossary / Crawl Budget

Crawl Budget

Crawl budget refers to the number of pages that a search engine bot or crawler is able to crawl on a website within a given time period. It is the maximum number of pages that a search engine is willing to crawl and index on a website. Crawl budget is an important factor for website owners and SEO professionals to consider as it determines how efficiently search engines can discover and index their web pages. If a website has a large crawl budget, search engines can crawl and index more pages, which can potentially lead to better visibility and rankings in search results. There are several factors that can affect crawl budget, including the size of the website, the server's ability to handle crawl requests, the website's popularity and authority, and the overall quality of the website's content. Websites with a higher crawl budget are typically those that are frequently updated, have a good internal linking structure, and provide valuable and unique content. To optimize crawl budget, website owners can take several steps, such as regularly updating and adding new content, improving website speed and performance, fixing broken links and crawl errors, and using robots.txt and XML sitemaps to guide search engine crawlers. Overall, crawl budget plays a crucial role in search engine optimization and can impact a website's visibility and organic search performance.