Tailoring Crawl Budget Strategies for Websites with Multilingual Content

To tailor crawl budget strategies for websites with multilingual content, focus on optimizing how search engines discover and crawl each language version without wasting resources on duplicates or low-value pages.

Key strategies include:

• Use hreflang tags correctly to specify language and regional variants, helping search engines understand which version to serve and avoid duplicate content issues. This is critical because each language version is treated as a separate URL, multiplying crawl demand.

• Implement a clear international URL structure, such as country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs), subdomains, or subdirectories, to separate language or regional versions logically. This helps crawlers efficiently navigate and prioritize important pages.

• Avoid duplicate content across languages by fully localizing content rather than just translating it, and ensure that each page sticks to one language only. Mixing languages on a single page can confuse both users and crawlers.

• Streamline site architecture by keeping the structure flat and using hub pages for language categories. Limit clicks to critical pages (ideally no more than two from the homepage) and use breadcrumbs to clarify site hierarchy, enabling crawlers to focus crawl budget on high-value multilingual content.

• Optimize technical performance by adopting HTTP/2 and Server Push to reduce latency and speed up crawling of pages with many assets, which is common in multilingual sites with diverse content.

• Prevent crawling of non-canonical URLs and low-value pages (e.g., duplicate language versions or outdated content) using robots.txt, noindex tags, or canonical tags to concentrate crawl budget on important localized pages.

• Regularly refresh and update multilingual content to increase crawl demand and signal to search engines that these pages are valuable and should be crawled more frequently.

By combining these approaches, you ensure that search engines efficiently crawl and index all relevant language versions without wasting crawl budget on duplicates or irrelevant pages, improving the SEO performance of multilingual websites.