Reasons for a sharp decline in pages crawled
-
Hello!
I have a site I've been tracking using Moz since July. The site is mainly stagnant with some on page content updates. Starting the first week of December, Moz crawler diagnostics showed that the number of pages crawled decreased from 300 to 100 in a week.
So did the number of errors through. So crawler issues went from 275 to 50 and total pages crawled went from 190 to 125 in a week and this number has stayed the same for the last 5 weeks.
Are the drops a red flag? Or is it ok since errors decreased also? Has anyone else experienced this and found an issue?
FYI: sitemap exists and is submitted via webmaster tools. GWT shows no crawler errors nor blocked URLs.
-
Google is indexing just over 80 URLs, although about 40% of them are developer test URLs (they lead to live pages of the site though). Nothing in robots.txt. No errors.
The Google bot is still crawling, but it's crawling half the pages. What would make it decrease in page crawls? I'm working if there is a broken link or something on the home page that's pointing away from the site... although it's unlikely, I'll check....
-
If you fixed a problem, such as duplicate content, that would mean that we're showing fewer errors and crawling fewer pages, since that problem is fixed. Might that be the case?
-
How many URLs are indexed in Google if you use site:yourdomain.com Has that figure dropped too?
Have you got anything in your robots.txt that could be blocking?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Blog-posts pages are dominating in search console "Internal Links". Only home-page at top!
Hi all, Ours is WordPress website and we have a blog...website.com/blog/. All the important pages in the website are well linked from top and footer menu. But in our webmasters...internal links section, only homepage is at the top. Blog-posts are others followed by homepage. I wonder why blog pages are dominating our website pages. Please give your suggestions on this. Do you think Google will give more priority for the blog-posts than website pages as they are more linked technically? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Help guide pages from subdirectory must be opened in a new tab?
Hi, We have help guide pages for every feature we provide. They been hosted on different sub directory and we linked them from our website pages. Do we need to make these sub directory pages to open in a new tab when clicked from our website pages? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Do pages with canonicals need meta data?
Page A has a canonical to Page B. Should Page A have meta data values such as description, keywords, dublin core values, etc.? If yes, should the meta data values be different on Page A and Page B?
Algorithm Updates | | Shirley.Fenlason1 -
Bing not indexing pages
We have taken all recommended steps to index our site sitegeek.com pages to Bing Bot but failed to index them. Bing bot crawled more than 5,000 pages every day but strange why pages are not getting index ? if we query site:sitegeek.com in Bing Bing Search Engine shows only 1,200 pages got indexed. but we query site:sitegeek.com in Google Google Search Engine show more 546,000 pages got indexed. For example : https://www.sitegeek.com/000webhost Above page crawled by Google but Bing. Can anyone suggest what we are missing on this page? what need to change to index such pages? Thanks! Rajiv
Algorithm Updates | | gamesecure0 -
Duplicate Product Pages On Niche Site
I have a main site, and a niche site that has products for a particular category. For example, Clothing.com is the main site, formalclothing.com is the niche site. The niche site has about 70K product pages that have the same content (except for navigation links which are similar, but not dupliated). I have been considering shutting down the niche site, and doing a 301 to the category of the main site. Here are some more details: The niche sites ranks fairly well on Yahoo and Bing. Much better than the main site for keywords relevant to that category. The niche site was hit with Penguin, but doesn't seem to have been effected much by Panda. When I analyze a product page on the main site using copyscape, 1-2 pages of the niche site do show, but NOT that exact product page on the niche site. Questions: Given the information above, how can I gauge the impact the duplicate content is having if any? Is it a bad idea to do a canonical tag on the product pages of the niche site, citing the main site as the original source? Any other considerations aside from duplicate content or Penguin issue when deciding to 301? Would you 301 if this was your site? Thanks in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | inhouseseo0 -
18 years later, Page Rank 6 Drops to 0, All +1s disappear, Scrapers outrank us
18 years ago I put up our first website at http://oz.vc/6 Traffic grew and our forums reached hundreds of thousands of posts, our website had a page rank of 6 and our forums and other content areas ranked 5-6, the others usually 4-6. Panda 2.2 came along and whacked it. No measures recommended by SEO experts and the Matt Cutts videos even made a dent, including some pretty severe measures that were supposed to make a difference. Bing and Yahoo traffic both grew since Panda 2.2 and only Google kept dropping every few updates without recovery. Several few weeks ago Google provides the ultimate whack. It seems every page other than the home page has either a PR of 0 or not generating any PR at all. Every +1 disappeared off of the site. Now three pages have +1 back and the entire guide section (hundreds of articles) are still missing all +1s. I discovered two scrapers, one of which was copying all of our forum posts and ranking a PR 2 for it (while we have a zero. They were taken down but I still can't imagine how this result could happen. I am going to have an RSS feed aggregator taken down that is ranking a 2 and knows we can't prevent them from taking our Wordress feeds and storing them (we use them for areas on the site.) How can Google provide us with a zero page rank and give obvious scrapers page rank? What should have been years worth of awesome rich added content and new features was wasted chasing Google ghosts. I've had two SEO people look at the site and none could point to any major issue that would explain what we've seen, especially the latest page rank death penalty. We haven't sold paid links. We have received no warnings from Google (nor should we have.) The large "thin" area you may see in a directory were removed entirely from Google (and made no difference and a drop in Google doing the "right" thing!) Most think we have been stuck for a very long time in the rare Google glitch. Would be interested in your insights.
Algorithm Updates | | seoagnostic0 -
Does the page title keyword count in anchor text when link is web address?
If someone links to my plumbing site with this link as the anchor text: http://www.plumbers.com/austin-plumbers.html does the key phrase "austin plumbers" get counted in the anchor text by google or is this a sample of anchor text that google ignores? Thanks mozzers! Ron
Algorithm Updates | | Ron100 -
In the body of index page i want to be able to add text that can be picked up by crawlers but I do not want these text to be visible? How can I code this?
in the body of index page i want to be able to add text that can be picked up by crawlers but I do not want these text to be visible? How can I code this?
Algorithm Updates | | FinindDesign0