Crawl Budget: What is it and why is it important for SEO?

Crawl budget is the amount of time and resources that search engine bots devote to crawling your website and indexing its pages.

Think about this: visit the Louvre, which has hundreds of exhibits spread across several floors.

Without a map, you might miss the art you want to see.

To create the map you hold in your hands, someone would have had to walk through each room, marking which paintings were listed there.

Louvre Level 2 MapIn this metaphor, the Louvre cartographer is

A team of cartographers constantly roaming the Louvre would slow down the experience for viewers.

Similar to how bots constantly crawling your website slow it down.

So cartographers need a set amount of time to update the map, just like Googlebot needs to know how often to crawl your website.

But if Googlebot encounters crawl errors that prevent it from reading and indexing your content, the chances of your pages appearing in search engine results pages (SERPs ) are slim.

You also don’t want Google bots crawling your site all the time.

Exceeding the budget allocated for crawling a website can cause slowdowns or errors in the system.

This can cause pages to be indexed late or not at all, resulting in lower search rankings.

Google uses hundreds of signals to decide where to rank your page. Crawling determines whether your page appears, not where, and has nothing to do with the quality of the content.

Two factors influence this question: popularity and staticity

Popularity
Google prioritizes pages with more backlinks or those that attract more traffic. So, if people visit your website or link to it, Google’s algorithm receives signals that your website deserves more frequent crawling.

In particular, backlinks help Google understand which job seekers database pages are worth crawling. If Google sees that people are talking about your website, it wants to crawl it more deeply to understand what it is about.

The number of backlinks alone doesn’t matter: backlinks must be relevant and come from authoritative sources.

You can use Semrush Backlink Analytics tool to see which pages are attracting the most backlinks and that can attract Google’s attention. Enter the domain and click on the ” Indexed Pages ” tab.

“Indexed Pages” tab in Backlink Analytics tool

Here you can see the pages with the most backlinks:

The “Backlink” column is highlighted in the “Indexed Pages” report.
Static
Googlebot will not crawl a page that has not been updated in a while.

Google has not disclosed how often the search engine will recrawl the website. However, if the algorithm notices a general site update, the bots temporarily increase the crawl budget.

For example, Googlebot frequently crawls news websites because they publish new content multiple times a day.

In this case, the website has a high crawling demand

Compare that to a website about the history of famous works of art that isn’t updated as frequently.

Other actions that may alert Google to changes that transforming sketches into art with ai magic need to be made include:

Domain Name Change: When you change your website’s domain name, Google’s algorithm needs to update its index to reflect the new URL. It will crawl your website to understand the change and pass ranking signals to the new domain.

Changing URL Structure: If you your website change the

URL structure of your website by changing the directory hierarchy or removing or adding subdomains, Google bots must re-recreate the pages to properly index the new URLs.
Content Updates: Significant updates to your website spam data content, such as rewriting a large portion of your pages, adding new pages, or removing outdated content, can catch the algorithm’s attention and cause it to re-raw your website.
XML Sitemap Submission: Updating your XML sitemap and resubmitting it to Google Search Console can let Google know that there are changes to crawl. This is especially helpful when you want to make sure Google indexes new or updated pages in a timely manner.