Crawl Rate Limit
The crawl rate limit was created by Google to help prevent your site from being overloaded because it was crawled too much. If it weren’t for the crawl rate limit, Google could make too many requests while crawling your website and cause it to slow down.
A few different factors could affect what your crawl rate limit is. If your website responds quickly, Google will be able to crawl more of it, while if it responds slowly, it will crawl less. Some websites choose to reduce the amount that their site is crawled, which can bring down your crawl rate limit, although Google recommends against doing this.
Crawl Demand
Despite whether or not the crawl rate limit is reached, Google can still crawl your site less depending on your crawl demand. If there’s no demand for a site to be indexed, Google won’t have a reason to crawl it.
If your URL is popular or if you regularly put out new content, Google will have to crawl your site to index any changes. Sites that aren’t updated will have a low crawl demand because there’s nothing for Google to index.
Why Crawl Budget Is Important?
Google needs to be able to crawl all of your URLs to be able to index the content. If Google isn’t able to crawl and index a page of a website, you won’t be getting any traffic to that page. If someone searches for information that you have, but it hasn’t been indexed, it won’t show up in any search results on Google. A bad crawl budget can hurt a website’s SEO.
Many businesses won’t have to worry much about crawl budgets for their websites. If your website has fewer than a couple thousand URLs, Google most likely won’t have any problems crawling it. However, larger website with thousands of URLs can run into some problems regarding their crawl budget. To help improve your crawl budget, you might consider using an online marketing agency.
Your crawl budget is also representative of user experience on your site. Speed and updated content both make an impact on your crawl budget and can also change a user’s feeling about your website. Just like Google won’t be able to crawl a slow website, a person will likely not want to wait for it to load as well. It also shows the importance of adding new content to your website. Having too many pages that don’t add value to your website can also bring down both.
