Looking to Decrease Your Crawl Budget? Think again.
This week: there’s a limit increase in sitemap file sizes, an old feature has been removed from the Search Console, and you might be surprised to learn what affects your crawl budget.
Here’s what happened this week in SEO.
Google and Bing Increase Sitemap File Size Limit to 50Mb
In a joint announcement between Google and Bing, the search engine companies said that they’re accepting sitemaps that are as large as 50Mb.
Previously, the size limit was 10Mb.
Sitemap files have been expanded to 50mb, allowing for up to 50,000 URLs to be listed.
Typically, sitemaps never even reach the 10Mb threshold. However, some sitemaps with very long URLs and tens of thousands of entries can exceed the limit.
Now, webmasters are in good shape as long as their sitemaps are under 50Mb.
It should be noted, though, that the size limit only applies to the file size, not the number of URLs in the sitemap. Both companies still allow no more than 50,000 URLs in a sitemap file.
Also, keep in mind that if your sitemap is as large as 50Mb, and Google accesses it frequently, you could see performance problems. It’s best to keep your sitemap as small as possible.
Google Removes Content Keywords Feature From Search Console
Google has taken away yet another feature in the Search Console. This time, it’s the content keywords report.
The report was one of the earliest features of the tool. When it first launched, Google said it was the “only way to see what Googlebot found when it crawled a website.”
Nowadays, though, other features like Search Analytics and Fetch have rendered the old report obsolete. Also, Google said that “users were often confused about the keywords listed in content keywords.”
Google Machine Learning Is Writing Featured Snippets Descriptions
Google continues to break new ground in the technological revolution.
Its latest venture: a machine-learning algorithm that understands and produces featured snippets in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
As of now, the feature only works on desktop search. If Google repeats history, though, you can expect to see it on mobile search in fairly short order.
Basically, the Big G now uses a “sentence compression algorithm” that learns how “to take a long sentence or paragraph from a relevant page on the web and extract the upshot – the information you’re looking for.”
That means Google is analyzing the countless bytes of content online and extracting just the tidbits of information that you’d find useful.
Google: The Meta Noindex Tag Won’t Save Your Crawl Budget
If you’re under the impression that a meta noindex tag will save your Google crawl budget, think again.
The fact is that Google has to crawl your page before it even discovers the meta tag. So it really doesn’t make sense at face value to think that it wouldn’t count against your crawl budget.
Still, somebody on Twitter felt the need to ask Google’s John Mueller about it.
@idanbenor nope.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) November 30, 2016
“Hi! Is meta noindex tag helps to ‘save’ crawling budget?” he asked.
Mueller’s reply: “Nope.”
Google: Canonical Tags Don’t Save “Much” Crawl Budget
While we’re on the subject of the crawl budget, Google says that using a canonical rel tag won’t save “much” of that budget.
Here’s what Ben Heligman asked John Mueller on Twitter this past week: “Quick question: do canonical tags have a crawl budget?”
@bheligman probably not (or not much). we have to pick a canonical & have to crawl the dups to see that they're dups anyway.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) November 30, 2016
Here’s how Mueller replied: “Probably not (or not much). We have to pick a canonical & have to crawl the dups to see that they’re dups anyway.”
The “not much” part is probably because Google crawls the duplicate URL version less frequently.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool Allows You to Submit Pages to Its Index
By now, you’ve probably heard of Google’s fairly new mobile-friendly testing tool. In fact, you’ve probably used that tool in the past to verify that your website is responsive.
Now, you can use the very same tool to submit your site to Google’s index. You’ll see a “Submit to Google” link following your (presumably good) report about your website. Just click that link and you’re good to go.
Of course, submitting a site to the index doesn’t mean that it gets indexed right away. That just means it’s put in the queue for indexing. Use other SEO methods to get your site indexed quickly.
