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Exploring Crawl & Render Stage Recommendations

Updated over a year ago

📘 This article explains the Botify recommendations for the Index stage of the SEO funnel on the Analytics Overview page.

Overview

The Crawl & Render stage of the SEO funnel provides insights into improving your crawl budget. When the Crawl & Render tab is active, links to relevant goal-based guidance pages are displayed at the bottom of the Analytics Overview page.

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Find answers to the following questions in the Crawl & Render stage:

Does Google crawl your indexable pages?

Google should be able to crawl most, if not all, of your indexable pages. The Top Charts section in SiteCrawler includes the “Cumulative Crawl Over Time by Google” chart, which shows the proportion of indexable pages Google Search was able to explore over the analyzed period. After 30 days, the green bars in the chart representing the total number of indexable pages should reach the dotted line at the top. Use the Segments filter to view results for the strategic sections of your site.

To access this report, navigate to SiteCrawler > Search Engines > Top Charts.

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Does Google crawl your strategic pages?

The “URLs Crawled by Google by Depth” chart in the Top Charts section of SiteCrawler details how Google and Bing are crawling your site compared to Botify. This chart is useful to quickly see which prominent pages on your site are internally linked to but are not being crawled by Google.

To access this report, navigate to SiteCrawler > Search Engines > Top Charts.

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Is your crawl budget wasted due to load time issues?

The "Load Time by Pagetype" chart in SiteCrawler’s Performance > Segments section provides average load times for each page type. Page types with a high average load time and low proportion of URLs crawled may indicate pages on your site take too long for Google to crawl your pages.

To access this report, navigate to SiteCrawler > Performance > Segments.

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Can you improve your internal linking to strategic pages?

The “Internal Pagerank by Dimension” chart in SiteCrawler’s Distribution Top Charts section compares your Indexable vs. Non-Indexable URLs. Ensure the distribution of your Internal Pagerank flows into the correct areas of your site. If a smaller, less important area of your site has a disproportionate number of internal links, there may be an opportunity to improve rankings by diverting some of those internal links to more important areas.

To access this report, navigate to SiteCrawler > Distribution > Top Charts.

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Should your Unknown Pages be excluded from Google’s crawl?

The Orphans Explorer report shows pages crawled by Google but not internally linked to on your site. Google may be crawling these unknown (orphan) pages by mistake, which wastes crawl budget, or there may be an opportunity to improve rankings by linking to these pages.

To access this report, navigate to SiteCrawler > Search Engines > Orphans Explorer.

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