Google SEO: 13 Misconceptions and Facts About Crawling

Google SEO: 13 Misconceptions and Facts About Crawling

Understanding Google’s crawl budget is crucial for effective SEO. Here, we’ll debunk common myths and clarify what really impacts your site’s crawl budget.

1. Compressing my sitemap will increase my crawl budget.

  • No, it won’t. A compressed sitemap still needs to be fetched from the server, so sending a compressed sitemap does not save Google much crawl time or effort.

2. Google prioritizes crawling newer content, so I should constantly tweak my pages.

  • False. Content is rated based on quality, regardless of its age. Create and update your content as needed, but making insignificant changes to make a page appear updated and altering its date won’t yield additional benefits.

3. Google prioritizes crawling older content (with higher weight) over new content.

  • False. If your page is useful, it remains useful regardless of its age.

4. The faster my page loads and renders, the more likely it is to be crawled by Google.

  • True. It’s partly true because our resources are limited by time and the number of crawling bots. If you can provide more pages within the limited time, we can crawl more of your pages. However, we might spend more time crawling sites with more important information, even if those sites run slower. Improving your site speed to enhance user experience may be more important than increasing your site speed to extend your crawl coverage. Helping Google crawl the right content is much simpler than ensuring everything gets crawled every time. Note that crawling involves retrieving and rendering content. The time it takes to render a page is as important as the time it takes to request it. Therefore, improving your rendering speed will also enhance your crawl speed.

5. Small sites are crawled less frequently than large sites.

  • False. If a site contains important content that changes frequently, Google will crawl it often, regardless of its size.

6. Content closer to the homepage is more important to Google.

  • Partially true. A site’s homepage is usually the most important page, and pages directly linked from the homepage might be deemed more important and crawled more frequently. However, this does not mean those pages will rank higher than others on the site.

7. Site speed and errors affect my crawl budget.

  • True. Improving site speed can enhance user experience and crawl speed. For Googlebot, a fast site indicates a well-functioning server, allowing it to gather more site content with the same number of connections. Conversely, numerous 5xx HTTP response status codes (server errors) or connection timeouts suggest a poorly functioning server, reducing Googlebot’s crawl speed. We recommend closely monitoring the “Crawl Stats” report in Search Console and keeping server error numbers low.

8. Crawling is a ranking factor.

  • False. Increasing crawl speed does not necessarily improve a site’s search result ranking. Google ranks results based on many factors. Although crawling is necessary for pages to appear in search results, it is not a ranking factor.

9. Alternate URLs and embedded content count towards the crawl budget.

  • True. Generally, any URL crawled by Googlebot counts towards the site’s crawl budget. AMP or hreflang alternate URLs and embedded content such as CSS and JavaScript (including XHR fetches) might need to be crawled, consuming the site’s crawl budget.

10. I can control Googlebot using the “crawl-delay” rule.

  • False. “Crawl-delay” is not a standard robots.txt rule, so Googlebot does not follow it.

11. Nofollow rules affect crawl budget.

  • Partially true. Any URL that is crawled affects the crawl budget, so even if you mark a URL as nofollow, as long as other pages on your site or any page on the web do not mark the link as nofollow, Googlebot will still crawl the URL.

12. I can control crawl budget using noindex.

  • Partially true. Any URL that is crawled affects the crawl budget. Google must crawl the page to find the noindex rule. However, noindex can help exclude content from the index. If you want to ensure these pages don’t end up in Google’s index, continue using noindex without worrying about the crawl budget. Additionally, note that removing URLs from Google’s index using noindex or other methods allows Googlebot to focus on other URLs on your site, indirectly freeing up some crawl budget for your site in the long run.

13. Pages serving 4xx HTTP status codes are wasting crawl budget.

  • False. Pages serving 4xx HTTP status codes (except 429) do not waste crawl budget. Google attempted to crawl the page but only received the status code without any other content.

By dispelling these myths, you can optimize your site’s crawlability. Focus on quality content and a well-functioning site to ensure effective crawling and indexing by Google.

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