A Technical SEO’s Guide to
Crawl Budget Optimization

A crawl budget is the calculated number of pages search engine bots can crawl within a certain period of time. Once your dedicated budget is exhausted, bots can no longer crawl or index the pages until the next cycle.

Googlebot uses a crawl budget to index a page and its SEO elements (after they get crawled). Once indexed, search engines will determine the page rank based on its technical SEO qualities and other related factors. If you do not get indexed due to JavaScript SEO issues, your content won’t appear in SERPs.

You can use the following crawl budget formula to measure its efficiency:

If the result is less than 3, your crawl budget is already optimal. If the result is higher than 10, you have 10x more pages on your site than what Google crawls per day. In this case, a crawl budget optimization is highly recommended.

Note: This is an estimation of your crawl budget status, not an exact or official conclusion.

Google determines crawl budgets based on three factors:

• Server performance: the better your server performs, the likelier Google will allocate more crawl budget.
• Content quality: having low-quality content will make Google deprioritize indexing your pages.
• URL popularity: popular URLs or pages that contain trending or breaking news topics are typically prioritized for indexation.

Learn how to improve these qualities to nudge Google to allocate a bigger crawl limit.

Here are a few methods to better manage your crawl budget:

• Use ‘robots.txt’ to prioritize your indexing list.
• Upgrade your server performance.
• Remove low-quality pages (e.g., duplicate, outdated, and poorly performing content).
• Clean and update your sitemap.
• Use a dynamic rendering solution like Prerender.

Find the step-by-step tutorial on how to execute them here.