Crawl budget
-
I am a believer in this concept, showing google less pages will increase their importance.
here is my question: I manage a website with millions of pages, high organic traffic (lower than before).
I do believe that too many pages are crawled. there are pages that I do not need google to crawl and followed. noindex follow does not save on the mentioned crawl budget. deleting those pages is not possible. any advice will be appreciated. If I disallow those pages I am missing on pages that help my important pages.
-
I just wrote a better reply so forgive me the file was deleted by hit post. But I do think this information will help you get acquainted much better with a crawl budget
One thing that may not incorporate your domain however is that is not centered a external link is a content delivery or CDN URL that is not rewritten to the traditional CDN.example.com Content delivery network URLs can look like
- https://example.cachefly.net/images/i-love-cats.jpg
- https://example.global.prod.fastly.net/images/i-love-cats-more.png
So you may see URLs like one shown here should be considered part of your domain and treated like a domain even if they look like this but these are just two examples of literally thousands CDN variants.
Examples for this would be the cost of incorporating your hostname to a HTTPS encrypted content delivery network can be very expensive.
Crawl budget information
- http://www.stateofdigital.com/guide-crawling-indexing-ranking/
- https://www.deepcrawl.com/case-studies/elephate-fixing-deep-indexation-issues/
- https://builtvisible.com/log-file-analysis/
- https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/the-seo-ruler/ ( image below)
Tools for Crawl budget
I hope is more helpful,
Thomas
-
Nope, having more or less external links will have no effect on the crawl budget spent on your site. Your crawl budget is only spent on yourdomain.com. I just meant that, Google's crawler will follow external links, but it won't until it's spent its crawl budget on your site.
Google isn't going to give you a metric showing your crawl budget, but you can assume how much it is by going to Google Search Console > Crawl > Crawl Stats. That'll show you how many pages Googlebot has crawled per day.
-
I see, thank you.
I'm guessing if we have these external links across the site, it'll cause more harm than good for us if they use up some crawl budget on every page?
Is there anyway to find out what the crawl budget is?
-
To be clear, Googlebot will find those external links and leave your site, but not until they've used their crawl budget up on your site.
-
Nope.
-
I'd like to find out if this crawl budget applies to external sites - we link to sister companies in the footer.
Will Google bot find these external links and leave our site to go and crawl these external sites?
Thanks!
-
Using Google's parameter tools you can also reduce crawl budget issues.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-url-parameters
http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2064349/crawl-index-rank-repeat-a-tactical-seo-framework
http://searchengineland.com/how-i-think-crawl-budget-works-sort-of-59768
-
What's the background of your conclusion? What's the logic?
I am asking because my understanding about crawl budget is that if you waste it you risk to 1) slow down recrawl frequency on a per page basis and 2) risk google crawler gives up crawling the website before to have crawled all pages.
Are you splitting your sitemap into sub sitemaps? That's a good way to spot groups/categories of pages being ignored by google crawler.
-
If you want to test this, identify a section of your site that you can disallow via robots.txt and then measure the corresponding changes. Proceed section by section based on results. There are so many variables at play that I don't think you'll get an answer that's anywhere as precise as testing your specific situation.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages.
Hello, My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages. I have contacted my theme company but not sure what could have done this. Any ideas? The original posts/pages are still correct and working it just looks like it did duplicates and added void(0 to the end of each post/page. Questions: There is no way to undo this correct? Do I have to do a redirect on each of these? Will this hurt my rankings and domain authority? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Wade
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neverenoughmusic.com0 -
Having issues crawling a website
We looked to use the Screaming Frog Tool to crawl this website and get a list of all meta-titles from the site, however, it only resulted with the one result - the homepage. We then sought to obtain a list of the URLs of the site by creating a sitemap using https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. Once again however, we just go the one result - the homepage. There is something that seems to be restricting these tools from crawling all pages. If you anyone can shed some light as to what this could be, we'd be most appreciative.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
URL Parameter & crawl stats
Hey Guys,I recently used the URL parameter tool in WBT to mark different urls that offers the same content.I have the parameter "?source=site1" , "?source=site2", etc...It looks like this: www.example.com/article/12?source=site1The "source parameter" are feeds that we provide to partner sites and this way we can track the referral site with our internal analytics platform.Although, pages like:www.example.com/article/12?source=site1 have canonical to the original page www.example.com/article/12, Google indexed both of the URLs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr.bfz
www.example.com/article/12?source=site1andwww.example.com/article/12Last week I used the URL parameter tool to mark "source" parameter "No, this parameter doesnt effect page content (track usage)" and today I see a 40% decrease in my crawl stats.In one hand, It makes sense that now google is not crawling the repeated urls with different sources but in the other hand I thought that efficient crawlability would increase my crawl stats.In additional, google is still indexing same pages with different source parameters.I would like to know if someone have experienced something similar and by increasing crawl efficiency I should expect my crawl stats to go up or down?I really appreciate all the help!Thanks!0 -
Would spiders successfully crawl a page with two distinct sets of content?
Hello all and thank you in advance for the help. I have a coffee company that sell both retail and wholesale products. These are typically the same product, just at different prices. We are planning on having a pop up for users to help them self identify upon their first visit asking if they are retail or wholesale clients. So if someone clicks retail, the cookie will show them retail pricing throughout the site and vice versa for those that identify themselves as wholesale. I can talk to our programmer to find out how he actually plans on doing this from a technical standpoint if it would be of assistance. My question is, how will a spider crawl this site? I am assuming (probably incorrectly) that whatever the "default" selection is (for example, right now now people see retail pricing and then opt into wholesale) will be the information/pricing that they index. So long story short, how would a spider crawl a page that has two sets of distinct pricing information displayed based on user self identification? Thanks again!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClayPotCreative0 -
Website up for 3 months still not crawl
Hi, I had this website www.reliabledegree.com up for three months, but it is still not crawl by Google. All my on page optimization is grade A but I cannot see any single page crawl by Google. What can I do ? Please advise. Thanks. David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stevejobs20110 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0 -
I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out why google stopped crawling.. any help is appreciated
This is going to be kind of long, simply because there is a background to the domain name that is not typical to anybody in the world really and I'm not sure if its possible that it was penalized or ranked lower because of that or not. Because of that I'm going to include it with the hopes that giving the full picture some nice soul in the world who has more knowledge in this than me see's something or knows something and can point me in the right direction. Our site has been around for a few years, at one point the domain was seized by homeland security ICE, and then they had to give it back in Dec. which sparked a lot of the SOPA PIPA stuff and we became the poster child so to speak. The site had previously been up since 2008, but due to that whole mess the site was down for 13 months on the dreaded seized server with a scary warning graphic and site title which caused quite obviously a bunch of 404 errors and who knows what else damage to anything we'd had before that as far as page rank and incoming links. we had a lot of incoming links from high quality sites. We were advised upon getting the domain back to pretty much scrap all the old content that was on the site prior and just start fresh.. which we did. Googlebot started crawling slowly, but then as we started getting back into the swing of things people started linking to us,some with high page rank, we were getting indexed quite frequently and ranking high on search results in our niche.. Then something happened on March 4th, we had arguably our best day with google traffic, we'd been linked back by places like Huff Post etc for content in our niche.. and the next day literally it was a freefall. Darn near nothing. I've attached a screen shot from webmaster tools so you can see how drastic it was. I went crazy, trying to figure out what was wrong, searching obsessively through webmaster tools looking for any indication of a problem, searched the site on google site:dajaz1.com and what comes up is page 2 page 3 page 45 page 46. It's also taken to indexing our category and tag pages and even our search pages. I've now set those all to noindex follow but when I look at where the googlebots are at on the site, they're on the categories, pages, author pages, and tags. Some of our links are still getting indexed, but doing a search just of our site name and we're ranking below many of the media sites that have written about our legal issues, when a month ago we were at least top result for our own name. I've racked my brain trying to figure out the issue. I've disabled plugins, I'm on fetch as google bot all the time making sure our stuff is at least coming out as 200 (we had 2 days where we were getting 403 errors due to a super-cache issue, but once fixed googlebot returned like it never left) I've literally watched 1000 videos, read 100 forums, added in SEO plugins, tried to optimize the site to the point I'm worried I'm over doing it.. and still they've barely begun to crawl. As you can see there is some activity in the last 2-3 days, but even submitting a new site map once I changed the theme out of desperation it's only indexed 16. I've looked for errors all through webmaster tools and I can't find anything to tell me why that happened, how to fix it, and how to get googlebot to like us again. I'm pulling my hair out here. The links we have incoming are high quality links like huffington post , spin, complex, etc. Those haven't slowed down at all, we do outgoing links to sites we trust and are high quality as well. I've got interns working on how they're writing titles and such, I've gone through and attempted to fix duplicate pages and titles.. I've been going through and re-writing meta description tags What am I missing? I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out what the issue is. Eternally grateful for any help provided. jnzb6.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | malady0 -
What is the best tool to crawl a site with millions of pages?
I want to crawl a site that has so many pages that Xenu and Screaming Frog keep crashing at some point after 200,000 pages. What tools will allow me to crawl a site with millions of pages without crashing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iCrossing_UK0