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What Is Crawl Budget?

Crawl budget refers to the number of pages on a website that a search engine's crawler (such as Googlebot) is willing to crawl and index within a certain timeframe.

This concept is crucial for website owners and SEO professionals, especially those working on eCommerce SEO, because it affects how quickly and thoroughly search engines discover, crawl, and index a site's content.

The crawl budget is determined by a combination of factors, including the site's size, the health of its links (both internal and external), the freshness of its content, and its overall authority and trustworthiness. High server response times and redundant content can negatively impact your site's crawl budget, as search engines aim to use their resources efficiently and are more likely to allocate a higher crawl budget to sites that are frequently updated with high-quality content and have a good link structure.

Optimizing a website's crawl budget is essential for ensuring that the most important pages are crawled and indexed regularly, improving the site's visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Strategies to optimize the crawl budget include improving site speed, fixing broken links, avoiding duplicate content, and effectively using the robots.txt file and sitemap to guide crawlers to the site's most valuable pages.

To check your crawl budget in Google Search Console, you need to examine the "Crawl Stats" report, which provides insights into how Googlebot interacts with your site.

Crawl Budget and the Crawl Stats report in Google.

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