Google has unveiled valuable tips on managing your website’s crawl budget as part of its new “Crawling December”series. The first post dives into the basics of crawling and offers actionable advice for SEOs and developers to optimize their sites for better indexing. Here’s a breakdown of the insights:

The Case for Hosting Resources Separately

Google recommends hosting resources like JavaScript, CSS, and images on CDNs or subdomains to free up your mainsite’s crawl budget. This strategy ensures that Googlebot can focus more on crawling your primary content rather than auxiliary resources.

Key Takeaways About Googlebot’s Crawling Process

• Googlebot Caches Resources for 30 Days
• Resources fetched during rendering are cached for up to 30 days, regardless of HTTP cache rules set by developers. This helps conserve crawl budget but requires mindful resource management.
• Blocking Resources in robots.txt Is a No-No
• Blocking resources critical for rendering, like JavaScript or CSS, can lead to incomplete page views, negatively impacting indexing and rankings.

How Googlebot Crawls Complex Pages

Today’s websites often rely on advanced JavaScript and CSS, making them harder to crawl. Googlebot operates similarly to a browser but on a delayed schedule:

1. Downloads the HTML from the main URL.
2. Uses Google’s Web Rendering Service (WRS) to fetch and process linked resources.
3. Constructs the final rendered page for indexing.

Crawl Budget Management Tips

1. Reduce Resource Load: Simplify pages by minimizing resource use. Fewer resources mean a smaller crawl budget per page.
2. Leverage CDNs or Subdomains: Offloading resources to separate hostnames helps shift the crawl burden, preserving your primary site’s crawl budget.
3. Mind Cache-Busting Parameters: Avoid unnecessary changes to resource URLs, which could force Google to re-download unchanged files, wasting crawl budget.

Monitoring Googlebot Activity

Check your site’s raw server logs to see which resources Googlebot is crawling. Use IP ranges from Google’s developer documentation to verify bot activity.

Why It Matters

By following Google’s recommendations, you can:

• Ensure efficient use of your crawl budget.
• Prevent rendering issues caused by blocked resources.
• Improve the likelihood of your site being fully indexed and ranked.

Understanding how Googlebot works and implementing these strategies can lead to better SEO outcomes, especially in competitive niches where every crawl counts.

Stay tuned as Google releases more insights throughout Crawling December—a month dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of Googlebot!

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