How to Optimize Your Crawl Budget

A crawl budget is the number of pages that a search engine crawler can visit and index on your website in a given period of time. The crawl budget is determined by a number of factors, including the size of your website, the number of pages on your website, and the frequency with which you update your website.

If your website has a large crawl budget, you can afford to have more pages on your website and to update your website more frequently. However, if your website has a small crawl budget, you need to be more careful about the number of pages on your website and the frequency with which you update your website.

There are a number of things you can do to optimize your crawl budget, including:

Create a sitemap: A sitemap is a file that lists all of the pages on your website. You can submit your sitemap to Google Search Console, which will help Google to understand the structure of your website and to crawl your website more efficiently.
Block pages from being crawled: You can use robots.txt to block pages from being crawled by search engines. This can be useful for pages that are not important for SEO, such as login pages or thank-you pages.
Use canonical URLs: Canonical URLs are a way of telling Google which page is the preferred version of a page. This can be useful for pages that have multiple versions, such as pages with different parameters in the URL.
Use internal links: Internal links are links from one page on your website to another page on your website. Internal links can help Google to discover new pages on your website and to crawl your website more efficiently.

By following these tips, you can optimize your crawl budget and make sure that Google is crawling the most important pages on your website.