Reduce Resource Use: Use fewer resources to create a good user experience. This helps save crawl budget when rendering a page.
Host Resources Separately: Place resources on a different hostname, like a CDN or subdomain. This can help shift the crawl budget burden away from your main site.
Use Cache-Busting Parameters Wisely: Be careful with cache-busting parameters. Changing resource URLs can make Google recheck them, even if the content is the same. This can waste your crawl budget.
Also, Google warns that blocking resource crawling with robots.txt can be risky.
If Google can’t access a necessary resource for rendering, it may have trouble getting the page content and ranking it properly.
Related: 9 Tips To Optimize Crawl Budget For SEO
Monitoring Tools
The Search Central team says the best way to see what resources Googlebot is crawling is by checking a site’s raw access logs.
You can identify Googlebot by its IP address using the ranges published in Google’s developer documentation.
Why This Matters
This post clarifies three key points that impact how Google finds and processes your site’s content:
Resource management directly affects your crawl budget, so hosting scripts and styles on CDNs can help preserve it.
Google caches resources for 30 days regardless of your HTTP cache settings, which helps conserve your crawl budget.
Blocking critical resources in robots.txt can backfire by preventing Google from properly rendering your pages.
Understanding these mechanics helps SEOs and developers make better decisions about resource hosting and accessibility – choices that directly impact how well Google can crawl and index their sites.
Related: Google Warns: URL Parameters Create Crawl Issues
Featured Image: ArtemisDiana/Shutterstock