Should I set a max crawl rate in Webmaster Tools?
-
We have a website with around 5,000 pages and for the past few months we've had our crawl rate set to maximum (we'd just started paying for a top of the range dedicated server at the time, so performance wasn't an issue).
Google Webmaster Tools has alerted me this morning that the crawl rate has expired so I'd have to manually set the rate again. In terms of SEO, is having a max rate a good thing?
I found this post on Moz, but it's dated from 2008. Any thoughts on this?
-
At first I assumed that by manually setting the crawl rate to the maximum, Google would crawl my website faster and more frequently. Our website has tens of thousands of pages so I didn't want Google missing any of it or taking a long time to index new content. We have new products added to the website daily and others that come off or change.
I'll let Google decide
-
Yep, they're a little vague here! But the answer is: Google will crawl your site at whatever rate it wants (it's probably crawling Amazon 24/7), unless you limit how much it can crawl in Google Webmaster Tools. Then, Google will crawl your site at whatever rate it wants, unless than rate is higher than the limit you put in, and then it will limit itself.
If you're anxious for Google to crawl your site more because a) you have something that's changed and you want Google to have it in their index, or b) because you're hoping it'll affect your rankings:
a) If there's specific information that you want Google to update its index with, submit the URL of the page that's new or changed into "Fetch as Googlebot" and then, once you fetch it, hit the "Submit to index" button to the right. I work on a site that's a DA 58 and fetching something as Googlebot updates the index within an hour.
b) How much Google crawls your site has to do with how important your site is; forcing Google to crawl your site more will not make it think your site is more important.
Hope this helps!
Kristina
-
Is selecting "Limit Google's maximum crawl rate" and then manually moving the rate to the highest (0.2 requests per second / 5 seconds between requests) a higher rate than selecting "Let Google optimize for my site (recommended)"? Google don't really expand on this! I want them to crawl at the very maximum but they don't tell us how many requests per second and seconds between requests are involved when selecting the optimized option.
-
You don't need to. Just let Google crawl at will. The only reason you would want to limit the crawl rate is if you're having performance issues from the server you're on (too much traffic at once). If you're not having any issues, then allow Google to crawl as many pages as they can.
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
-
Would you rate-control Googlebot? How much crawling is too much crawling?
One of our sites is very large - over 500M pages. Google has indexed 1/8th of the site - and they tend to crawl between 800k and 1M pages per day. A few times a year, Google will significantly increase their crawl rate - overnight hitting 2M pages per day or more. This creates big problems for us, because at 1M pages per day Google is consuming 70% of our API capacity, and the API overall is at 90% capacity. At 2M pages per day, 20% of our page requests are 500 errors. I've lobbied for an investment / overhaul of the API configuration to allow for more Google bandwidth without compromising user experience. My tech team counters that it's a wasted investment - as Google will crawl to our capacity whatever that capacity is. Questions to Enterprise SEOs: *Is there any validity to the tech team's claim? I thought Google's crawl rate was based on a combination of PageRank and the frequency of page updates. This indicates there is some upper limit - which we perhaps haven't reached - but which would stabilize once reached. *We've asked Google to rate-limit our crawl rate in the past. Is that harmful? I've always looked at a robust crawl rate as a good problem to have. Is 1.5M Googlebot API calls a day desirable, or something any reasonable Enterprise SEO would seek to throttle back? *What about setting a longer refresh rate in the sitemaps? Would that reduce the daily crawl demand? We could set increase it to a month, but at 500M pages Google could still have a ball at the 2M pages/day rate. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lzhao0 -
Webmaster Tools "Not found" errors after sitemap update
Hello Mozzers - I found a sitemap with loads of URL errors on it (none of the URLs on sitemap actually existed) so I went ahead and updated sitemap - now I'm seeing a spike in "not found" errors in WMT - is this normal / anything to worry about when you significantly change a sitemap. I've never replaced every URL on a sitemap before! L
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
GWT Crawl Error Report Not Updating?
GWT's crawl error report hasn't updated for me since April 25. Crawl stats are updating normally, as are robots.txt and sitemap accesses. Is anyone else experiencing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tonyperez0 -
Whole site blocked by robots in webmaster tools
My URL is: www.wheretobuybeauty.com.auThis new site has been re-crawled over last 2 weeks, and in webmaster tools index status the following is displayed:Indexed 50,000 pagesblocked by robots 69,000Search query 'site:wheretobuybeauty.com.au' returns 55,000 pagesHowever, all pages in the site do appear to be blocked and over the 2 weeks, the google search query site traffic declined from significant to zero (proving this is in fact the case ).This is a Linux php site and has the following: 55,000 URLs in sitemap.xml submitted successfully to webmaster toolsrobots.txt file existed but did not have any entries to allow or disallow URLs - today I have removed robots.txt file completely URL re-direction within Linux .htaccess file - there are many rows within this complex set of re-directions. Developer has double checked this file and found that it is valid.I have read everything that google and other sources have on this topic and this does not help. Also checked webmaster crawl errors, crawl stats, malware and there is no problem there related to this issue.Is this a duplicate content issue - this is a price comparison site where approx half the products have duplicate product descriptions - duplicated because they are obtained from the suppliers through an XML data file. The suppliers have the descriptions from the files in their own sites.Help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rrogers0 -
Best tools for exploring links?
and not just every single link, but ones you know that Google is actually indexing. I find seomoz to be super easy, but there is no way to distinguish links that are actually counting "juice", or am i missing something. What about majesticseo - any other similar tools you use when trying to find linking sites that pass juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
How to stop Google crawling after 301 redirect?
I have removed all pages from my old website and set 301 redirect to new website. But, I have verified old website with Google webmaster tools' HTML verification file which enable me to track all data and existence of pages in Google search for my old website. I was assumed that, Google will stop crawling and DE-indexed all pages after 301 redirect. Because, I have set 301 redirect before 3 months. Now, I'm able to see Google bot activity on my website with help of Google webmaster tools. You can find out attachment to know more about it. How can it possible & How Google can crawl removed pages? You can see following image to know more about it. First & Second
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
How does Google Webmasters decide what order to show external links?
In "links to your site" how does Google Webmasters determine the order of the URLs? By influence? Quality?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How to set cannonical link rel to CS CART
I whant to specify a link rel cannonical for each category page, how to do that without changing the code (just from admin section), because filters and sorting search are making the site dublicate content with their parameters; If there is a way please specify the method, i whant to avoid hours of working in a script like this. Thank's.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oneticsoft0