Crawl Budget Optimisation: How to Make Googlebot Love Your Site

How to Make Googlebots Love Your Website

While Google keeps relatively quiet about what their algorithms look for and do, there are some optimisation techniques you can use to make Googlebots love your website, these include:

Create a Clear Structure 

When your website structure is confusing, Googlebots will not be able to understand the contents of your website, page hierarchy, or what pages it needs to index. This means creating a website with clear structure, some tips include:

• Hierarchy – create a logical page hierarchy, helping Googlebots navigate your site, indexing your content easily
• XML Sitemaps – provide Google with a sitemap, which is a road map for your website. This helps Googlebots find and understand your page hierarchy
• Internal linking – internal links within your website, improves navigation, helping Googlebots identify other pages of your website, along with understanding their position

Improve Efficiency

Google provides websites with a minimal crawl budget, so you need to ensure you don't waste any time. In order to improve crawl efficiency, you can:

• Robots.txt – provides the Googlebots with clear instructions on what pages they can access and crawl, along with those that can't
• Noindex Tags – these meta tags tell Googlebots that you don't want specific content being indexed, ensuring they only index the pages you want to be visible to your audience

Manage Duplicate Content 

Duplicate content is a big issue when it comes to wasting your Google crawl budget. While you should be avoiding duplicate content, it's not uncommon for ecommerce stores to have some duplicated content. For websites that have duplicate content, you don't want to waste your crawl budget with the Googlebots crawling each individual page, while not knowing which of the pages should be indexed.

You can add canonical tags to the original URL, telling Googlebots which version they should index. This is an excellent way to conserve your crawl budget. 

A useful tip is to use Google Search Console to identify duplicate content issues, enabling you to fix the issue as quickly as possible.

Update Content Regularly

Google identifies your website as active, increasing your crawl budget when you publish new pages, blog, posts, and other content on a regular basis. To send fresh content signals to Google to increase your crawl budget, you should:

• Publish fresh content regularly – new web pages and blogs attract more visitors to your website, encouraging Googlebots to come back and crawl your new content frequently
• Update and Remove Content – some pages will become outdated over time, updating these pages ensures Googlebots see them as active. Updating or removing content also helps to keep your website relevant, appealing to website visitors, while encouraging Googlebots to crawl more often

Monitor for Crawl Errors

Crawl errors make it difficult for web crawlers to find, understand, and index your web pages. Crawl errors can be redirect loops to dead pages. Monitoring regularly for crawl errors, along with fixing any errors, ensures Googlebots can crawl your website efficiently, making the most of your crawl budget:

• Google Search Engine Console – check site data, reports, and server errors. Identify issues and fix them to improve the Googlebots crawl efficiency
• Fix 404 Errors Immediately – 404 errors can impact your crawl budget, along with other crawling issues. Fix these issues as soon as possible to avoid impacting your SEO efforts and wasting your valuable crawl budget

Conclusion

In order to maximise your Google crawl budget, you will need an effective approach, making use of crawl budget optimisation to improve site structure and web speed, content, mobile responsiveness and more. Following SEO best practices is the most effective way to ensure your crawl budget is optimised. If you need help maximising your crawl budget and getting your web pages indexed by Googlebots, get in touch with the team at Genie Crawl today to find out more.