Crawl budget: What you need to know in 2025

Crawl budget remains a pivotal yet often misunderstood aspect of SEO, and understanding its implications is crucial for optimizing your website's technical SEO in 2025.

Why do search bots limit their crawling activities?

Google's Gary Illyes provided insightful commentary on crawl budget, emphasizing Googlebot's role as a "good citizen of the web." This concept is fundamental to understanding why crawl budget exists.

Consider the scenario where tickets for a popular concert go on sale, and the website crashes due to excessive traffic. Similarly, if bots like Googlebot crawl a site too aggressively, they could overwhelm the server, leading to performance issues.

To prevent this, Googlebot adjusts its "crawl capacity limit" based on the site's ability to handle the traffic. If the site performs well, crawling continues or may increase; if it struggles, the crawl rate is reduced.

The financial implications of crawling

Crawling, parsing, and rendering consume resources, and there's a financial aspect to consider. Search engines like Google adjust their crawling strategies not only to protect the websites they crawl but also to manage their own operational costs.

What is crawl budget?

Crawl budget represents the amount of time and resources Googlebot dedicates to crawling a website, determined by two factors: the crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.

• Crawl capacity limit: This is the maximum amount of crawling a site can handle without impacting its performance.
• Crawl demand: This reflects Googlebot's evaluation of the need to crawl and update the content on a website.

Popular pages are crawled more frequently to keep the search index current. Google balances its crawling resources with the necessity to protect both the website and its infrastructure.

What leads to crawl budget issues?

Not every website will experience crawl budget problems. Google specifies that only certain types of sites need to actively manage their crawl budget:

• Large sites with over 1 million unique pages.
• Medium to large sites with frequently updated content.
• Sites with a high number of "Discovered – currently not indexed" pages, as shown in Google Search Console.

However, don't assume your site is unaffected without a thorough check. Even a small ecommerce site with faceted navigation and pagination might have significantly more URLs than initially thought. Crawl your site as Googlebot or Bingbot would to get a true sense of its size.

Why is crawl budget important?

Google recommends that the mentioned site types monitor their crawl budget because if it's insufficient, new or updated URLs might not be discovered or indexed, impacting their visibility and ranking.

How do crawl budget issues arise?

Three primary factors contribute to crawl budget issues:

• Quality of URLs: Googlebot assesses the value of new pages based on the site's overall quality. Pages with duplicate content, hacked content, or low-quality spam might not be deemed worthy of crawling.
• Volume of URLs: Technical issues like faceted navigation and infinite URL creation can lead to an unexpectedly high number of URLs.
• Accessibility: Non-200 server response codes can reduce crawling frequency, and excessive redirects can cumulatively affect crawling.

Quality

Googlebot might skip crawling new pages if it predicts they won't add significant value to the index due to issues like:

• High volumes of duplicate content.
• Hacked pages with low-quality content.
• Internally created low-quality or spam content.

Volume

Common technical issues can lead to a higher volume of URLs than expected:

Faceted navigation

On ecommerce sites, faceted navigation can generate numerous URLs from a single category page. For example, filtering cat toys by "contains catnip" and "feathers" and sorting by price can create multiple unique URLs.

Infinite URL creation

Date-based systems like event calendars can create "bot traps" if users can navigate to future dates indefinitely. This can lead to bots crawling irrelevant future dates, wasting resources that could be used on more relevant content.

Accessibility

If URLs frequently return non-200 response codes like 4XX or 500, bots may reduce crawling and potentially remove them from the index. Excessive redirects can also impact crawling.

How to identify crawl budget problems

Identifying crawl budget issues requires more than just a visual inspection of your site.

Check search engine reports

Use tools like Google Search Console's "Crawl stats" and "Page indexing" reports to see if there are crawl issues or a high number of unindexed pages.

Analyze log files

Log files can reveal which pages haven't been crawled recently, especially if those pages are new or frequently updated.

How to resolve crawl budget problems

Before addressing crawl budget issues, confirm that they exist. Some solutions are general best practices, while others require careful implementation to avoid negative impacts.

A word of caution

Distinguish between crawling and indexing issues before making changes. Blocking crawling to remove pages from the index can be counterproductive if those pages are already indexed.

Using robots.txt to manage crawl budget

The robots.txt file can help manage which pages bots crawl. Use the "disallow" command to prevent bots from crawling unwanted URLs, but be aware that malicious bots might ignore this.

Enhancing page quality and load speed

Improving page load speed and content quality can encourage more crawling. Ensure that pages are not too thin, duplicated, or spammy.

Controlling crawling with robots.txt

Use the "disallow" command in robots.txt to prevent bots from crawling unnecessary pages like filtered category results.

Using nofollow links on internal links

Adding the "nofollow" attribute to internal links can prevent bots from crawling certain pages, like future dates on an events calendar.

Navigating crawl budget for SEO success in 2025

While most sites won't need to worry about crawl budget, monitoring how bots interact with your site is essential for maintaining its technical health. Addressing any issues promptly can help ensure your content is crawled and indexed effectively.

Explore further: Top 6 technical SEO action items for 2025

Contributors to Search Engine Land are selected for their expertise and are overseen by our editorial team to ensure quality and relevance. Their opinions are their own.

The above is the detailed content of Crawl budget: What you need to know in 2025. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!