Google Confirms: High-Quality Content Is Crawled More Often via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

SEO professionals have long discussed the concept of a “crawl budget,” which refers to the limited number of pages search engines can crawl daily.

The assumption is that sites must stay within this allotted budget to get pages indexed.

However, in a recent podcast, Google’s Search Relations team debunks misconceptions about crawl budgets and explains how Google prioritizes crawling.

How Googlebot Prioritizes Crawling

Dave Smart, an SEO consultant and Google Product Expert, acknowledges the confusion surrounding crawl budget:

“I think there’s a lot of myths out there about crawling, about what it is and what it isn’t. And things like crawl budgets and phrases you hear thrown around that may be quite confusing to people.”

Gary Illyes answered Dave with a question:

“All right. I will turn this around and I will ask you, if you operated a crawler, how would you decide what to fetch?”

David Smart, the SEO consultant, responded:

“You need to do it by looking at what’s known, finding somewhere to start, a starting point. And from that, you get the links and stuff, and then you would try and determine what’s important to go and fetch now, and maybe what can wait until later and maybe what’s not important at all.”

Gary Illyes expanded on how Google decides how much to crawl by explaining the role of search demand.

This is what Gary said:

“One is the scheduler, which basically says that I want to crawl this …But that’s also kind of controlled by some feedback from search. …if search demand goes down, then that also correlates to the crawl limit going down.”

Gary does not explain what the phrase “search demand” means. But the context of his entire statement is from Google’s perspective.  So from Google’s perspective “search demand” probably means search query demand. Search query demand makes sense because if nobody’s searching for Cabbage Patch Kids then Google doesn’t really have a reason to crawl websites about Cabbage Patch Kids.  But again, Gary did not explain what “search demand” means so we have to look at it from the context in which that phrase was spoken.

Gary finishes  his thought on that topic with this sentence:

“So if you want to increase how much we crawl, then you somehow have to convince search that your stuff is worth fetching, which is basically what the scheduler is listening to.”

Gary does not elaborate what he means by “convince search that your stuff is worth fetching” but one interpretation could be to make sure it’s relevant to user trends, which means keeping up to date.

Related: How To Manage Crawl Budget For Large Sites

Focus On Quality & User Experience

So, what can websites do to ensure their pages get crawled and indexed efficiently? The answer lies in focusing on site quality.

As Illyes puts it:

“Scheduling is very dynamic. As soon as we get the signals back from search indexing that the quality of the content has increased across this many URLs, we would just start turning up demand.”

By consistently improving page quality and the usefulness of your content to searchers, you can overcome any assumed limitations on crawling.

The key is to analyze your site’s performance, identify areas for improvement, and focus on delivering the best possible experience to your target audience.

In Summary

Google’s recent insights clarify that a fixed “crawl budget” is largely a myth. Instead, the search engine’s crawling decisions are dynamic and driven by content quality and search demand.

By prioritizing quality, relevance, and user experience, site owners can ensure that their valuable pages get discovered, crawled, and indexed by Google – without worrying about hitting an arbitrary limit.

Hear the full discussion in the podcast episode linked below:

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Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock