How to Analyze Crawl Budget? Search Console & Log File

We have compiled the methods for understanding which pages on your website are crawled and how frequently, to help you perform a successful crawl budget analysis and optimization! In this content, you will learn to determine how often search engine bots visit your website using two different methods, enabling you to perform a successful crawl budget optimization!

What is Crawl Budget?

Crawl budget is the total amount of resources allocated for managing a website's crawling process. These resources include factors such as the number of pages a search engine can visit, crawl frequency, and crawl depth. Crawl budget determines how your website is perceived and indexed by search engines.

Crawl budget is especially important for large websites. These sites may contain thousands of pages and pieces of content, and search engines will want to crawl these pages regularly. However, search engines do not have unlimited resources for every website, so crawl budget helps optimize the crawling process of a website.

Crawl budget can also help a website rank higher in keyword search results. This is because regular crawling by search engines allows them to detect updated content and changes, resulting in better rankings. Additionally, crawl budget can improve a website's accessibility and usability.

How to Analyze Crawl Budget?

To analyze crawl budget and determine how often search engines crawl which pages, you can use two different methods. One is the Crawl Stats report provided by Search Console, and the other is the Log File Analyzer tool in Semrush. Although the Search Console tool provides reliable results, it does not summarize the crawl frequency of pages. Therefore, by using Semrush's Log File Analyzer tool, you can analyze the log file directly from your server and examine the most accurate results.

Crawl Budget Analysis with Search Console

To perform a crawl budget analysis using the Search Console panel, first open the Search Console panel and go to the "Settings" panel located at the bottom right.

Then, in the opened panel, click on the "Crawl Stats" option located in the middle section.

In the opened panel, we can see which domains and subdomains the search engine (Google) bots discovered on our website, which response codes they received from these URLs, which file types such as HTML, CSS, JS, and Images were visited, how frequently, and which errors occurred.

For example, when we look at pages with 200 response codes, we can see how often and on which dates Google crawled these pages and perform our crawl budget analysis.

Of course, since Search Console does not summarize the crawl frequency of these pages, to find out, you can "Export" the pages and examine them in Excel, or use our second method, the Semrush Log File Analyzer tool.

Crawl Budget Analysis with Semrush

With the Semrush Log File Analyzer tool, you can upload a log file from your server to learn all the IP addresses, search engine bots, visited pages, and crawl frequencies for your website.

First, go to the Semrush Log File Analyzer tool. Then click the "Upload Log File" button on the right side.

In the opened window, select the log file downloaded from your server, upload it, and then click the Processing button to start the analysis.

Once the analysis is complete, Semrush provides information about which subfolders/URLs and pages are most frequently crawled by search engine bots, their crawl frequencies, and response codes according to the log file data.

For example, in our analysis, we see that the /tr folder's blog pages on our website were visited and crawled the most. 

Thanks to this analysis, you can also learn how the crawl budget is being used on your website and ensure that the pages you want to highlight are crawled more frequently by performing appropriate optimizations!

How to Optimize Crawl Budget?

Optimizing crawl budget requires taking specific steps to ensure the healthy crawling process of a website. These steps may include:

Optimize Page Hierarchy: Optimizing your website's page hierarchy makes your crawl budget usage more efficient. This ensures that important pages are crawled more frequently.

Reduce Duplicate Content: Duplicate content can be perceived as spam by search engines and negatively affect your crawl budget usage. Therefore, efforts should be made to eliminate factors causing multiple versions of the same content on your website.

Fix Broken Links: Broken links reduce the usability of your website and affect crawl budget usage. Therefore, create a regular maintenance plan to fix broken links.

Create an XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap ensures that all pages and content on your website are crawled by search engines. It helps use your website’s crawl budget more efficiently.

Update Content Regularly: Regular content updates ensure that search engines crawl your website consistently, which can help your site achieve better rankings.

Optimize Page Speed: Page speed directly impacts your crawl budget. Fast-loading pages allow search engines to crawl your website more quickly.

Focus on Internal Linking: The number of links pointing to a webpage from within your site correlates with the crawl importance of that page. Therefore, make sure to link to the pages you want to highlight from visible areas of your site.

Crawl budget is just one of the strategies to improve a website's performance. However, its difference from other strategies is that it is directly affected by search engines. Optimizing your crawl budget ensures that your website is crawled more frequently and can help achieve better rankings. For detailed information on crawl budget optimization, you can check our blog titled 7 Steps to Crawl Budget Optimization!

In conclusion, crawl budget is important for managing a website's crawling process. Optimizing this budget ensures that your website is crawled more frequently by search engines and helps achieve better rankings. Steps to optimize crawl budget include optimizing page hierarchy, reducing duplicate content, fixing broken links, creating an XML sitemap, regularly updating content, and optimizing page speed.