Crawl efficiency - Page indexed after one minute!
-
Hey Guys,A site that has 5+ million pages indexed and 300 new pages a day.I hear a lot that sites at this level its all about efficient crawlabitliy.The pages of this site gets indexed one minute after the page is online.1) Does this mean that the site is already crawling efficient and there is not much else to do about it?2) By increasing crawlability efficiency, should I expect gogole to crawl my site less (less bandwith google takes from my site for the same amount of crawl)or to crawl my site more often?Thanks
-
This is a complicated question that I can't give a simple answer for, as every site is set-up differently and has it's own challenges. You will likely use a variety of the techniques mentioned in my last paragraph above. Good luck.
-
Thanks Anthony,
Your explanation was very helpful.
Assuming that 3 millions pages out of my 5 are not so important for google to be crawling or indexing.
What would be the best way to optimize my crawl efficiency in relation to the amount of pages?
Just <noindex>3 million pages on the site, I believe this can be a risk move.</noindex>
Perhaps robots.txt but that would not de-index the existing pages.
-
Crawl efficiency isn't exactly the same as indexation speed. It is normal for a new page to be indexed quickly, often times it is linked to from the blog home page, shared on social networks, etc.
Crawl efficiency has a lot to do with making sure your most important pages are crawled as frequently as possible. Let's use the example of your site with 5,000,000 pages indexed. Perhaps there are 100,000 of those pages that are extremely important for your website. Your top categories, all of your products, your content, etc.
Then you are left with 4,900,000 pages that are not that important, but needed for the functionality of your website (pagination, filtering, sorting, etc). You have to determine, is it a good thing that Google has 5 million pages of your site indexed? Do you want Google regularly crawling those 4,900,000 pages, potentially at the expense of your more important pages?
Next, you check your Google Webmaster Tools and see that Google is crawling about 130,000 pages/day on your site. At that rate, it would take Google 38 days (over an entire month) to crawl your entire site. Of course, it doesn't actually work that way - Google will crawl your site in a logical manor, crawling the pages with high authority (well linked to internally/externally) much more often. The point is, you can see that not all of your pages are being crawled every day. You want your best content crawled as frequently as possible.
"To be more blunt, if a page hasn't been crawled recently, it won't rank well." This quote is taken from one of my favorite resources on this topic, is this post by AJ Kohn. http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization
Crawl efficiency is guiding the search spiders to your best content and helping them learn what types of pages you can ignore. You do this primarily through: Site Structure, Internal Linking, robots.txt, NoFollow attribute and Parameter Handling in Google Webmaster Tools.
-
You can actually let Google know about a new mass of pages through the sitemap. The sitemap is a single file what can be parsed to produce a large list of links.
Google can discover new pages by comparing the list of links with what they know about.
Here's an intro link that covers the sitemap: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-google-to-index/
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
-
Google Adsbot crawling order confirmation pages?
Hi, We have had roughly 1000+ requests per 24 hours from Google-adsbot to our confirmation pages. This generates an error as the confirmation page cannot be viewed after closing or by anyone who didn't complete the order. How is google-adsbot finding pages to crawl that are not linked to anywhere on the site, in the sitemap or linked to anywhere else? Is there any harm in a google crawler receiving a higher percentage of errors - even though the pages are not supposed to be requested. Is there anything we can do to prevent the errors for the benefit of our network team and what are the possible risks of any measures we can take? This bot seems to be for evaluating the quality of landing pages used in for Adwords so why is it trying to access confirmation pages when they have not been set for any of our adverts? We included "Disallow: /confirmation" in the robots.txt but it has continued to request these pages, generating a 403 page and an error in the log files so it seems Adsbot doesn't follow robots.txt. Thanks in advance for any help, Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoeuroflorist0 -
Google is indexing wrong page for search terms not on that page
I’m having a problem … the wrong page is indexing with Google, for search phrases “not on that page”. Explained … On a website I developed, I have four products. For example sake, we’ll say these four products are: Sneakers (search phrase: sneakers) Boots (search phrase: boots) Sandals (search phrase: sandals) High heels (search phrase: high heels) Error: What is going “wrong” is … When the search phrase “high heels” is indexed by Google, my “Sneakers” page is being indexed instead (and ranking very well, like #2). The page that SHOULD be indexing, is the “High heels” page (not the sneakers page – this is the wrong search phrase, and it’s not even on that product page – not in URL, not in H1 tags, not in title, not in page text – nowhere, except for in the top navigation link). Clue #1 … this same error is ALSO happening for my other search phrases, in exactly the same manner. i.e. … the search phrase “sandals” is ALSO resulting in my “Sneakers” page being indexed, by Google. Clue #2 … this error is NOT happening with Bing (the proper pages are correctly indexing with the proper search phrases, in Bing). Note 1: MOZ has given all my product pages an “A” ranking, for optimization. Note 2: This is a WordPress website. Note 3: I had recently migrated (3 months ago) most of this new website’s page content (but not the “Sneakers” page – this page is new) from an old, existing website (not mine), which had been indexing OK for these search phrases. Note 4: 301 redirects were used, for all of the OLD website pages, to the new website. I have tried everything I can think of to fix this, over a period of more than 30 days. Nothing has worked. I think the “clues” (it indexes properly in Bing) are useful, but I need help. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MG_Lomb_SEO0 -
Google indexing pages from chrome history ?
We have pages that are not linked from site yet they are indexed in Google. It could be possible if Google got these pages from browser. Does Google takes data from chrome?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Why is page still indexing?
Hi all, I have a few pages that - despite having a robots meta tag and no follow, no index, they are showing up in Google SERPs. In troubleshooting this with my team, it was brought up that another page could be linking to these pages and causing this. Is that plausible? How could I confirm that? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SSFCU
Sarah0 -
Google indexing "noindex" pages
1 weeks ago my website expanded with a lot more pages. I included "noindex, follow" on a lot of these new pages, but then 4 days ago I saw the nr of pages Google indexed increased. Should I expect in 2-3 weeks these pages will be properly noindexed and it may just be a delay? It is odd to me that a few days after including "noindex" on pages, that webmaster tools shows an increase in indexing - that the pages were indexed in other words. My website is relatively new and these new pages are not pages Google frequently indexes.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Do search engines crawl links on 404 pages?
I'm currently in the process of redesigning my site's 404 page. I know there's all sorts of best practices from UX standpoint but what about search engines? Since these pages are roadblocks in the crawl process, I was wondering if there's a way to help the search engine continue its crawl. Does putting links to "recent posts" or something along those lines allow the bot to continue on its way or does the crawl stop at that point because the 404 HTTP status code is thrown in the header response?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brad-causes0 -
If I only Link to Page via Sitemap, can it still get indexed?
Hi there! I am creating a ton of content for specific geographies. Is it possible for these pages to get indexed if I only put them in my sitemap and don't link to them through my actual site (though the pages will be live). Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Travis0 -
Why Does Ebay Allow Internal Search Result Pages to be Indexed?
Click this Google query: https://www.google.com/search?q=les+paul+studio Notice how Google has a rich snippet for Ebay saying that it has 229 results for Ebay's internal search result page: http://screencast.com/t/SLpopIvhl69z Notice how Sam Ash's internal search result page also ranks on page 1 of Google. I've always followed the best practice of setting internal search result pages to "noindex." Previously, our company's many Magento eCommerce stores had the internal search result pages set to be "index," and Google indexed over 20,000 internal search result URLs for every single site. I advised that we change these to "noindex," and impressions from Search Queries (reported in Google Webmaster Tools) shot up on 7/24 with the Panda update on that date. Traffic didn't necessarily shoot up...but it appeared that Google liked that we got rid of all this thin/duplicate content and ranked us more (deeper than page 1, however). Even Dr. Pete advises no-indexing internal search results here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world So, why is Google rewarding Ebay and Sam Ash with page 1 rankings for their internal search result pages? Is it their domain authority that lets them get away with it? Could it be that noindexing internal search result pages is NOT best practice? Is the game different for eCommerce sites? Very curious what my fellow professionals think. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak
Dan0