What is crawl budget, and should you worry about it?
guide // , 5 min read, by Darthwares
Crawl budget refers to how much a search engine crawler accesses and processes pages on your website within a given timeframe. You should primarily worry about managing crawl budget if your site is large, complex, or frequently updated, as efficient crawling helps search engines discover your important content. For most smaller websites, search engines can typically find and index content without explicit crawl budget management. Search engines like Google use tools such as robots.txt files and sitemaps to manage how they interact with websites.
On this page // 6 sections
The short version
- Crawl budget is about how much a search engine crawls your site.
- Large, complex, or rich media sites benefit most from managing crawl budget.
- Robots.txt files help manage crawler traffic and prevent server overload.
- Sitemaps guide search engines to important pages for efficient crawling.
- Robots.txt does not prevent indexing; use noindex or password protection for that.
What is crawl budget?
Crawl budget refers to the resources a search engine allocates to crawl a website, primarily to avoid overloading the site with requests. Google documents that a robots.txt file is used mainly to manage crawler traffic to your site, preventing an excessive number of requests that could strain your server. This management helps search engines like Google crawl your site more efficiently, ensuring they can discover and process your content without causing performance issues.
While search engines aim to crawl websites effectively, they also prioritize not overwhelming a site's infrastructure. Therefore, managing how crawlers interact with your site, especially for larger or more complex sites, can lead to more efficient discovery of your important pages and files.
Who needs to manage crawl budget?
You should manage crawl budget if your website is large, complex, or features a lot of rich media content, as these types of sites benefit most from guiding search engine crawlers efficiently. Google states that a sitemap can improve the crawling of larger or more complex sites, or those with more specialized files.
Specifically, Google notes that large sites often find it difficult to ensure every page is linked by at least one other page on the site, making sitemaps valuable for discovery. Sites with a lot of rich media content, such as video or images, or those featured in Google News, also benefit from explicit guidance to crawlers. For smaller, simpler websites, search engines are generally able to find and index content without specific crawl budget optimization efforts.
How does robots.txt help manage crawling?
A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs they are allowed to access on your site. Google explains that its primary purpose is to manage crawler traffic and prevent your site from being overloaded with requests. This helps maintain your server's performance by controlling the rate at which crawlers visit your pages.
It is important to understand that a robots.txt file is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google Search results. Google cautions against using it to hide web pages, including PDFs and other text-based formats. If a web page is blocked with a robots.txt file, its URL can still appear in search results, though without a description. Furthermore, a page disallowed in robots.txt can still be indexed if other sites link to it.
To properly prevent a URL from appearing in Google Search results, you should password-protect the files on your server, use the noindex meta tag or response header, or remove the page entirely. Google also warns that combining multiple crawling and indexing rules might cause some rules to counteract others, leading to unintended outcomes.
How do sitemaps help manage crawling?
Sitemaps help manage crawling by providing search engines with information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, along with their relationships. Google states that search engines read this file to crawl your site more efficiently. A sitemap tells search engines which pages and files you consider important, offering valuable context about them.
While a sitemap helps search engines discover URLs on your site, it does not guarantee that all the items listed will be crawled and indexed. However, Google notes that sitemaps can significantly improve the crawling of larger or more complex sites, or those with specialized files, by guiding crawlers directly to content that might otherwise be harder to find.
What are the technical requirements for sitemaps?
The Sitemap protocol specifies that sitemaps must adhere to an XML schema, consisting of XML tags. All data values within a sitemap must be entity-escaped to ensure proper parsing. Additionally, all URLs listed in a sitemap must originate from a single host, such as www.example.com or store.example.com, meaning you cannot include URLs from different domains in one sitemap file.
There are specific size and URL limits for sitemap files. Each sitemap file you provide must contain no more than 50,000 URLs and must not exceed 50MB (52,428,800 bytes) in size. If your site has more than 50,000 URLs, you must create multiple sitemap files to accommodate them. When providing multiple sitemaps, you should then list each individual sitemap file within a sitemap index file, which acts as a master list for all your sitemaps.
The location of a sitemap file on your server is also important, as it determines the set of URLs that can be included in that specific sitemap. Generally, a sitemap located at the root of your domain can list URLs from across the entire domain.
Common questions
Can robots.txt hide my pages from Google?
No, a robots.txt file is not a reliable mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google Search results. Google states that if a page is blocked with robots.txt, its URL can still appear in search results, and it can even be indexed if linked from other sites. Its main purpose is to manage crawler traffic, not to hide content.
What if my site has more than 50,000 URLs?
If your site has more than 50,000 URLs, you must create multiple sitemap files. Each individual sitemap file can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 50MB. If you use multiple sitemap files, you should then list all of them in a sitemap index file.
Does a sitemap guarantee my pages will be indexed?
No, a sitemap helps search engines discover URLs on your site, but it does not guarantee that all the items in your sitemap will be crawled and indexed. It serves as a guide to improve the efficiency of crawling, especially for larger or more complex sites.
What is the main purpose of a robots.txt file?
The main purpose of a robots.txt file is to manage crawler traffic to your site and avoid overloading it with requests. It tells search engine crawlers which URLs they are allowed to access, helping to maintain server performance.
How do I properly prevent a page from appearing in search results?
To properly prevent your URL from appearing in Google Search results, you should password-protect the files on your server, use the noindex meta tag or response header, or remove the page entirely. Using a robots.txt file alone is not sufficient for this purpose.
Primary sources and further reading
This article was researched and written by an AI model and published automatically. It was written from sentences that were checked to appear on the pages below, but a person has not reviewed the text. If something is wrong, tell us at chibivikramathithan@darthwares.com and we will correct it.