Defining the Google crawl budget

Through our SEO Agency Optimize 360

---

Le Google crawl budget is an essential concept for all website owners concerned about their SEO.

By optimising this budget, it is easier to improve a site's position in the search results and generate more traffic. In this article, we will look at the issues surrounding the crawl budget and the best strategies for optimising it.

 

Understanding the crawl budget

To understand the subject properly, we need to define budget crawl.

The term "crawl" refers to the action carried out by the robots of a search engine, such as Google, when they go through the different pages of a website. website. These robots discover the content and analyse it so that the engine can then index and rank it in its search results.

The crawl budget corresponds to the number of resources allocated by Google in order to crawler a site over a given period.

---

This budget takes into account both the frequency with which the robot visits a page (quantity) and the time it spends analysing its content (resources).

Why optimise your crawl budget?

A good crawl budget is important for several reasons:

• Better indexing : The higher your crawl budget, the more regularly Google's robots can visit your pages to analyse and index their content.
  A good crawl budget ensures that your new pages are indexed more quickly and that your old pages are updated regularly.
  
  
• Savings on server resources : Google's robots also consume resources when they visit your website.
  By optimising your crawl budget, you reduce the stress on your server and avoid potential overloads that could slow down or block access to your site for your users.

How can you optimise your crawl budget?

To optimise your crawl budget, there are several levers to pull:

Technical audit of your site

The first step is to carry out a full technical audit of your site in order to identify the factors that could have a negative impact on your crawl budget. These factors include

• • URL errors (pages not found, misconfigured redirects, etc.)
  • Pages take too long to load
  • Duplicate or obsolete content
  • The absence of an XML site map (sitemap) up to date

By correcting these problems, you can make Google's robots' work easier and improve your crawl budget.

Optimising internal links

Le internal networking of your site also plays a crucial role in managing your crawl budget. You need to ensure that the robots can navigate easily from one page to the next in order to discover and index as much content as possible. With this in mind, think about :

• • Organise your site into a logical tree structure
  • Include relevant internal links between your pages
  • Set up a system of breadcrumbs (breadcrumb trail) to make navigation easier

Content management

The content of your site also has a strong impact on your crawl budget. The richer your site is and the more in line it is with Google user searches, the better it will be optimised. To maximise this potential, we recommend that you :

• • Regularly update the content of your site to attract the interest of spiders
  • Creating title and meta description relevant to each page
  • Implementing structured data (schema.org) to help the robots in their analysis
  • Exploit the entire semantic field around your theme

Measuring the improvement in your crawl budget

Once you have implemented these different strategies, you need to measure their effectiveness on your crawl budget. There are a number of tools available for this, including the Google Search Console.

This free platform provided by Google allows you to monitor the evolution of your crawl budget and identify weak points that need to be improved. Thanks to the data provided by Search Console, you can :

• Observe and correct exploration errors
• Check page load times
• Analyse impressions, clicks and average position in search results

By observing these statistics regularly, you can refine your strategy and adjust your optimisations to maximise your Google crawl budget.