SEO
3
min read

Increase Google Bot Crawl Rate: Maximize Your Website's Indexing

Learn how to improve your website's Google crawl rate and increase indexing by updating your website often with fresh content, optimizing loading speed, using sitemaps, reducing server response times, avoiding duplicate content, blocking unwanted sites, optimizing videos, interlinking blog posts, utilizing ping services, eliminating black hat SEO consequences, creating quality links, and increasing social shares.
Written by
Josselin Liebe
Published on
June 12, 2023
Updated on
November 13, 2023
Readers rating
25
votes

Update Your Website Often with Fresh Content

If Googlebot cannot correctly crawl your website, your pages and articles will not be indexed. Google crawl rate is the frequency at which Googlebot visits your website. It will vary depending on the nature of your website and the material you publish. Recognize that you can't make Googlebot love you; instead, extend an invitation to showcase your incredibleness.

Googlebot crawling

12 Ways to Improve Your Website's Google Crawl Rate

Following that, I'll list several ways you can do to increase Google's crawl rate.

Update Your Website Often with Fresh Content

Content is one of the most crucial factors for search engines. Websites with frequently updated information have a good probability of being frequently crawled. It is advised that you post content three times each week to increase Google's crawl rate. Instead of creating new web pages, you can use a blog to publish new content. It is one of the simplest and most efficient ways to produce material consistently.

Enhance Your Website's Loading Speed

Enhance your website's loading speed because crawlers only have a short window of time to index your site. It won't have time to browse other pages if it takes too long to view your photographs or pdfs. Use fewer photos and graphics on smaller pages to speed up the loading of your website. Take aware that crawlers may have trouble with embedding video or audio.

Sitemaps Should Be Included To Boost Google Crawl Rate

It is recommended that all of the website's content be crawled, but occasionally this doesn't happen or, worse, takes a very long period. One of the crucial steps you must do to enable Googlebot to find your website is the submission of sitemaps. A sitemap makes it possible to crawl a website quickly and effectively. Also, they will aid in appropriately classifying and ranking your web pages. Hence, the pages with primary material will be crawled and indexed before the pages with secondary content.

To Speed Up Server Response Times

You should lower your server response time to around 200ms, according to Google. There is a good probability that your visitors will experience the same issue if Google is experiencing slow load times. Whether or not your web pages are optimized for speed is irrelevant. Your pages will load slowly if your server responds slowly. If this is the case, Google will make note of it on the Google Search Console's "crawl rate" page. You can choose "Faster." Improve your site's cache and make efficient use of the hosting you have.

Avoid Duplicate Content

As search engines can quickly detect duplicate content, it will lower Google's crawl rate. The presence of duplicate content shows that you lack direction and uniqueness. Search engines may ban your website or degrade your search engine ranks if the amount of duplicate content on your pages exceeds a specified threshold.

Block Unwanted Sites Using Robots.txt

If your website is big, you can have content that you don't want search engines to index. The admin page and backend directories, as examples. Googlebot can be prevented from crawling those undesirable pages by robots.txt. Simple is how Robots.txt is primarily used. Nevertheless, using them might be difficult, and if you make a mistake, your website may be removed from the search engine index. Thus, before uploading, always use Google Webmaster tools to test your robots.txt file.

Videos Should Also Be Optimized

Videos should also be optimized, as search results will only show them if they are. The ability of crawlers to read images directly like humans will be limited. Use alt tags and include descriptions for a search engine to index whenever you use photos. The same idea holds true for videos. Because it cannot index "flash," Google does not like it. It is preferable to utilize these items sparingly or not at all if you are having problems optimizing them.

Video optimization

Link-up Your Blog Posts

Googlebot can thoroughly crawl your websites when you interlink blogs on your own blog. Create links between new and old postings. By doing this, you will significantly enhance Google's crawl rate as well as your ranking.

Utilize Ping Services

Use ping services to alert bots to the addition of new material on your website. It is the same as waving a flag and requesting that search engines take a look at fresh content. It's wise to ping frequently because it can significantly speed up the process by which search engines index your content. Pinging is unquestionably worthwhile, but results are not always certain and can change. With the assistance of a reputable SEO agency, you must work on constructing backlinks and adhere to established practices.

Eliminate Black Hat SEO Consequences

If you used any black hat SEO strategies, you must also eliminate all of the results that were a result of those strategies. This involves link manipulation, content spam, keyword stuffing, and the use of irrelevant terms. Using unethical SEO methods results in a low-quality website for crawlers. If you want to enhance Google's crawl rate, only utilize ethical methods. Here are some of the top SEO case studies that were successful.

Create Quality Links

Your website's indexation speed and Google crawl rate will both increase as a result of high-quality backlinks. Also, it is the best strategy to improve rankings and increase visitors. White hat link-building is a solid strategy even here. Avoid stealing, buying, or borrowing connections. The best way to acquire them is through resource links, broken link-building solutions, and guest blogging.

Attempt to Increase Social Shares

While there is no proof that social shares will affect search ranking, they do speed up the indexing of fresh information. For instance, Twitter forbids the crawling of any results, whereas Facebook forbids the crawling of any non-public information. If you quickly check their files for robots.txt to confirm. Googlebot and Bingbot can still access material on social media that is accessible to the general public. So, obtaining a respectable number of shares for your content will aid in a speedy crawl and index.

12 Ways to Improve Your Website's Google Crawl Rate
12 Ways to Improve Your Website's Google Crawl Rate

Google’s Crawl Budget

Google has a set limit on the number of pages its bots are willing and able to crawl for each website on the internet. Googlebot can only spend so much time scanning and indexing our web pages since the internet is a very large area. Making sure that the appropriate pages from our websites appear in Google's index and are subsequently displayed to searchers is accomplished using crawl budget optimization. Due to Googlebot's ability to crawl through the majority of websites without hitting its cap, Google's advice for optimizing the crawl budget is quite constrained. Enterprise-level and e-commerce websites, however, run the risk of exceeding their budget due to a large number of landing pages. Even worse, a 2018 study discovered that Google's crawlers were unable to access more than half of the pages from larger sites included in the experiment. It can be more challenging for developers to achieve technological optimizations when they involve controlling how to crawl spending is used. Nonetheless, it's worthwhile to make every attempt to optimize the crawl budget for enterprise-level and e-commerce sites. Site owners and SEO experts can direct Googlebot to frequently crawl and index their best-performing pages by making a few minor changes.

How Does Google Calculate Its Crawl Budget?

The amount of time and money Google is willing to invest in crawling your website is known as the "crawl budget." The calculation looks like this:

Crawl Rate + Crawl Demand = Crawl Budget

The factors that affect a website's crawl rate include domain authority, backlinks, site speed, crawl problems, and amount of landing pages. Bigger sites typically have a greater crawl rate, whereas lesser, slower, or sites with lots of redirects and server issues typically have a lower crawl rate. Furthermore, Google bases its crawl budget on "crawl demand." Popular URLs have a higher need for crawling because Google wants to give consumers the most recent content. Pages that haven't been crawled recently will also be in more requests because Google doesn't appreciate having stale information in its index. Google will boost crawl demand if your website undergoes a site move in order to more rapidly update its index with your new URLs.

The crawl budget for your website is flexible and not set in stone. If you increase the speed of your website or server, Googlebot may begin to crawl it more frequently because it will know that it is not impacting users' web experience negatively. Consult your Google Search panel Crawl Report to obtain a greater awareness of the present overall crawl space for your site.

Does The Crawl Budget Require Being A Concern For Each And Every Website?

Crawl budget is not a concern for smaller websites that are only concerned with ranking a few landing pages. Larger websites, however, particularly unwholesome websites with significant amounts of broken pages and redirects, might quickly exceed their crawl limit. Large websites with tens of thousands of landing pages are typically those that are most susceptible to exceeding their crawl budget. Crawl budgets frequently hurt significant e-commerce websites. I've come across several business websites with many of their landing pages not indexed, giving them no chance to rank in Google. E-commerce websites in particular need to be extra careful about how their crawl money is used for a few objectives.

Thousands of landing pages are created by many e-commerce companies automatically for each SKU or for each area or state where they conduct business.

When items are taken out of stock, new products are introduced, or other changes to the inventory occur, these types of websites frequently update their landing pages.

E-commerce websites frequently use session identifiers and duplicate pages (like product pages) (e.g. cookies). Both are regarded by Googlebot as having "low-value-add" URLs, which has a detrimental effect on the crawl rate.

The fact that Google may change its crawl budget at any time makes it difficult to influence it. A sitemap is a crucial step for big websites to take in order to optimize the crawling and indexing of their most crucial pages, but it is insufficient to stop Google from using all of your crawl budget on low-quality or ineffective pages.

What Steps May Webmasters Take To Optimize Their Crawl Budget?

Even though site owners have the option to set greater crawl limits in Google Search Console, doing so does not ensure an increase in crawl requests or have an impact on which pages Google actually crawls. Increasing the number of times Google crawls your website may seem like the most logical option, but there are relatively few adjustments that directly correlate with higher crawl rates.

Everyone is aware that effective budgeting involves being more careful with your expenditures rather than raising your spending caps. Using the same idea on a smaller budget can produce amazing outcomes. Here are a few clever ideas to help Google make the most of its financial resources.

Step 1 - Determine which pages on your site Google is really indexing

The number of crawl requests a site received on a certain day was the only information provided by Google Search Console's crawl report until recently. The best source to learn how Google crawls your site is still in your server log files, even if Google's new Crawl Stats Report offers far more extensive data regarding crawling.

Step 2 - Recognize that not every page on your landing site needs to be ranked in Google

Since they permit Google to crawl every landing page on their website, so many enterprise-level websites waste their crawl money. Even more, many websites like to include all of their pages in their mobile apps so that Google can find and crawl them all. This is incorrect because not all of our landing pages will actually score. Owners of enterprise-level and e-commerce websites ought to be aware of which pages on their sites are most likely to rank highly and generate conversions. Then, they should take full advantage of every opportunity to ensure that Google devotes a crawl budget to those pages with the highest performance. Spending a crawl budget on your website's landing pages with good ranking and conversion potential is worthwhile. Here are some suggestions to help Googlebot factor those pages into your budget.

Make your site map less extensive by fewer pages. Limit your attention to the pages that truly stand a possibility of ranking highly and receiving online visibility.

Remove pages that are ineffective or superfluous. Delete any pages that don't contribute anything because they provide no meaningful function or aren't effective at converting visitors.

Trim the content. Redirect visitors to other landing pages on your website that are relevant and do receive traffic by pruning the pages that receive no organic traffic. Redirects do consume a little portion of your crawl allowance, so use them rarely and never again in a row.

Any website owner finds it challenging to let go of information, but blocking Google from crawling specific pages is far simpler than convincing it to boost your overall crawl budget. If you want to make the most of your crawl budget, optimizing your site will increase the likelihood that Google's crawlers will identify and index the finest content.

Step 3 - To make strong pages more visible to Google's crawlers, use internal links

The right pages of your website will receive greater attention from Google's crawlers once you've determined which pages it is crawling, updated the relevant robots tags, removed or reduced ineffective sites, and modified your sitemap. Yet your pages must have the necessary qualities to rank in order to effectively utilize that money. Excellent practices for on-page SEO are essential, but using your internal linking structure to promote those reasonably powerful sites is a more sophisticated technical approach.

Your website only has a specific amount of site equity depending on its Internet footprint, just like Googlebot has a limited crawl budget. It is your duty to strategically concentrate your equity. This entails allocating site equity to the pages that focus on keywords for which you have a reasonable probability of ranking as well as to the ones that drive traffic from the correct kinds of customers—those who are likely to convert and truly have economic value and bring you traffic.

3 Steps to optimize your crawl budget
3 Steps to optimize your crawl budget
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