Definition
Crawling is the first step in the search engine indexing process. Software robots called crawlers or spiders (such as Googlebot for Google) traverse the web from link to link to discover new pages and check for updates to existing pages. Each site has a crawl budget that determines how many pages Googlebot will explore during each visit. Optimizing your site's crawl is essential to ensure all important pages are discovered and regularly updated in the index. The robots.txt file and the XML sitemap are the main crawl management tools.
Key Points
- Googlebot is Google's main crawler that discovers and explores web pages
- Crawl budget is the number of pages Google explores on a site per visit
- A well-configured XML sitemap and robots.txt optimize site exploration
Practical Examples
Crawl budget optimization
An e-commerce site with 50,000 pages blocks crawling of filter pages and unnecessary pagination via robots.txt, allowing Googlebot to focus its crawl budget on strategic product pages and categories.
Server log analysis
By analyzing server logs, a webmaster identifies that Googlebot spends 60% of its time crawling useless admin pages. Correcting crawl directives improves the crawl frequency of important pages.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ensure your site has a clear architecture with effective internal linking, submit an up-to-date XML sitemap in Search Console, properly configure robots.txt, improve page load speed, and avoid redirect chains. Quality backlinks also encourage Googlebot to visit your site more frequently.
Crawl budget represents the number of pages Googlebot will explore on your site within a given timeframe. It is determined by crawl rate (how many requests the server can handle) and crawl demand (Google's interest in your pages). For large sites, a poorly optimized crawl budget means important pages may not be explored regularly.
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Last updated: 2026-02-07