What Is It and Does It Affect SEO?

What Is Crawl Budget?

Crawl budget is the amount of time and resources search engine bots allocate to crawling your website and indexing its pages.

Think of it this way: you visit the Louvre, which has hundreds of exhibits across several floors.

Without a map, you could miss out on the art you really wanted to see.

To make the map you have in your hands, someone would have to walk through each room, marking which paintings were listed there.

In this metaphor, the Louvre mapmaker is like a Googlebot crawling a website.

A team of mapmakers constantly running around the Louvre would slow down the experience for spectators.

Similar to the way bots constantly crawling your website would slow it down.

So the mapmakers need a set time to update the map, just as the Googlebot needs to know how often it should crawl your website.

Do Crawl Budgets Affect SEO?

Crawl budget isn’t a ranking factor for technical SEO.

But if Googlebot experiences crawl errors that prevent it from reading and indexing your content, the chances of your pages showing up on search engine results pages (SERPs) are slim.

You don’t want Googlebots crawling your site all the time either.

Exceeding the allocated budget for crawling a website can cause slowdowns or errors in the system.

That can lead to pages being indexed late or not at all, resulting in lower search rankings.

Google uses hundreds of signals to decide where it should place your page. Crawling directs whether your page shows up—not where—and...