If you’re looking to optimize your site’s crawl budget, you must understand how pages are linked. Ideally, there should be at least one internal link to each page. In addition, you should ensure that your pages are unique. Duplicate content can eat into your crawl budget, and Google doesn’t want to waste its resources indexing pages that have duplicate content.
Inefficient crawling can cause a website to lose visitors. Moreover, if your crawl budget is low, the search engines won’t crawl all the important parts of your site, which can hamper your SEO performance. There are several ways to increase your crawl budget, including adding more external links. However, these strategies only work if your site is large enough.
Google Search Console has a section that allows you to check how many pages it crawls each day. Click on the “Crawl Stats” tab. Enter the number of pages on your sitemap and divide it by the average number of pages crawled per day. The result should be less than 10. If it is higher than that, you need to increase your crawl budget. In addition, your crawl budget may be affected by various technical aspects of your website, such as AMP, Hreflang, CSS, JavaScript queries, and XHR requests.
Another factor that can negatively impact your crawl budget is if your page takes a long time to load or does not load at all. Slowly loading pages will send a signal to search engines that your site is not capable of handling the request. Therefore, you should take measures to ensure that your pages load faster than the average. A poor internal linking structure can also result in many pages not being indexed by the search engines.