Google’s Search team has recently debunked the myth surrounding the concept of a ‘crawl budget.’ Traditionally, many SEO professionals believed that search engines could only crawl a limited number of search pages per day. As a result, many people tried to keep their sites within a certain page limit to maximise their indexation.
However, Gary Illyes, Google Analyst, has suggested that the amount of crawling on your search pages directly correlates to how worthwhile the scheduler considers your content. He also implies that higher ‘search demand’ which likely means search query demand, leads to more crawling. This makes sense as Google would have less reason to crawl low search volume keywords and reallocate crawling capacity to keywords that are in high demand.
Although this doesn’t directly answer the question, it suggests that site quality is the key factor to ensure your pages are getting crawled and indexed efficiently.
As such, given that crawling is highly dynamic rather than fixed, site owners should prioritise quality, relevance, and user experience.
In simple terms, concentrating on the following will likely enhance the crawlability of your website:
- Creating informative and relevant content for your target audience. This can be done by targeting specific, long-tailed keywords on blogs and branded and informational keywords on core pages.
- Regularly updating content to reflect the latest data and trends. This ensures Google perceives your content as relevant and this repurposing will prove efficient compared to opting for new content creation.
- Resorting to natural backlinks from reputable sources. Links are a key ranking factor, and link spam algorithms will sniff out manipulative unnatural backlinks.