Google Clarifies: Frequent Crawling for high Quality Content

Google Search Relations team has highlighted that creating quality, user-focused content is essential for enhancing crawl frequency, dispelling myths about crawl budgets.

highlighted

• Websites aren’t restricted by a set crawl budget. Google’s crawling is influenced by the quality of content and signals of user engagement.
• The optimal strategy to boost crawl frequency is to produce superior, user-centric content.
• SEO experts have long debated the notion of a “crawl budget,” meaning the finite number of pages that search engines can index daily.

The misconception is that websites should limit their content within this budget for indexing.

But, according to a recent podcast by Google’s Search Relations team, this idea is more myth than reality, offering insights into Google’s actual crawl priorities.

How Googlebot Prioritizes Crawling for high Quality Content

Strategy SEO consultant and Google Product Expert Dave Smart addresses the misunderstandings about crawl budget:

“There seems to be misunderstanding surrounding crawl concepts, including budget concerns, which can be baffling.”

So, what determines Google’s crawling choices?

Smart clarifies this:

“The approach involves starting with known elements, establishing a starting point. From there, Google decides which pages are crucial to crawl immediately, which can wait, and which are unnecessary.”

This implies that Google’s approach is more flexible than a fixed budget, focusing on content’s relevance and quality.

Gary Illyes of Google’s Search Relations further explains crawling dynamics:

“If there’s a decrease in search demand, the crawl limit also drops. To boost your crawl rate, you need to make your content more appealing to the search algorithms.”

Illyes emphasizes the significant impact of user engagement and search demand on crawl priorities.

The higher your content’s value to users, the more Google will likely prioritize your pages for crawling.

Prioritize Content Quality and User Experience

What actions can webmasters take to ensure effective crawling and indexing? Focus on content excellence and user experience, advises Illyes:

“The scheduling fluctuates dynamically. If feedback from search indexing indicates an improvement in content quality, we’ll increase the crawl rate.”

This points out that websites should not be constrained by a specific “budget” or limit.

Improving page quality, securing natural links, and demonstrating content value can surpass any perceived crawl constraints.

Each website is unique, so there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to optimizing for Google’s crawl.

The strategy should be to analyze your website’s performance, identify improvement areas, and commit to delivering an optimal user experience.

Summary

Google’s recent clarifications debunk the myth of a rigid “crawl budget.” Instead, Google’s crawl decisions are adaptable, based on the quality of content, user interactions, and demand.

By emphasizing quality, relevance, and user experience, website owners can ensure their content is prioritized for crawling and indexing by Google, sidestepping concerns about any arbitrary limitations.

In this episode of Search Off the Record, Gary Illyes and Lizzi Sassman take a deep dive into crawling the web: what is a web crawler, and how does it really work? Listen along as the Search team is joined by an expert web developer in the SEO community, Dave Smart, for an in-depth and technical discussion of all things crawling, and maybe dispel some myths along the way.

Listen to the entire discussion in the linked podcast episode: