Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
I agree with Matt that there can probably be a reduction of pages, but that aside, how much of an issue this is comes down to what pages aren't being indexed. It's hard to advise without the site, are you able to share the domain? If the site has been around for a long time, that seems a low level of indexation. Is this a site where the age of the content matters? For example Craigslist?
Craig
-
Thanks for your response. I get where you're going with that. (Ecomm store gone bad.) It's not actually an Ecomm FWIW. And I do restrict parameters - the list is about a page and a half long. It's a legitimately large site.
You're correct - I don't want Google to crawl the full 500M. But I do want them to crawl 100M. At the current crawl rate we limit them to, it's going to take Google more than 3 months to get to each page a single time. I'd actually like to let them crawl 3M pages a day. Is that an insane amount of Googlebot bandwidth? Does anyone else have a similar situation?
-
Gosh, that's a HUGE site. Are you having Google crawl parameter pages with that? If so, that's a bigger issue.
I can't imagine the crawl issues with 500M pages. A site:amazon.com search only returns 200M. Ebay.com returns 800M so your site is somewhere in between these two? (I understand both probably have a lot more - but not returning as indexed.)
You always WANT a full site crawl - but your techs do have a point. Unless there's an absolutely necessary reason to have 500M indexed pages, I'd also seek to cut that to what you want indexed. That sounds like a nightmare ecommerce store gone bad.
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
-
Unsolved How much time does it take for Google to read the Sitemap?
Hi there, I could use your help with something. Last week, I submitted my sitemap in the search console to improve my website's visibility on Google. Unfortunately, I got an error message saying that Google is not reading my sitemap. I'm not sure what went wrong. Could you take a look at my site (OceanXD.org) and let me know if there's anything I can do to fix the issue? I would appreciate your help. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OceanXD1 -
What happens to crawled URLs subsequently blocked by robots.txt?
We have a very large store with 278,146 individual product pages. Since these are all various sizes and packaging quantities of less than 200 product categories my feeling is that Google would be better off making sure our category pages are indexed. I would like to block all product pages via robots.txt until we are sure all category pages are indexed, then unblock them. Our product pages rarely change, no ratings or product reviews so there is little reason for a search engine to revisit a product page. The sales team is afraid blocking a previously indexed product page will result in in it being removed from the Google index and would prefer to submit the categories by hand, 10 per day via requested crawling. Which is the better practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AspenFasteners1 -
Why is Amazon crawling my website? Is this hurting us?
Hi mozzers, I discovered that Amazon is crawling our site and exploring thousands of profile pages. In a single day it crawled 75k profile pages. Is this related to AWS? Is this something we should worry about or not? If so what could be a solution to counter this? Could this affect our Google Analytics organic traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
How do I know if I am correctly solving an uppercase url issue that may be affecting Googlebot?
We have a large e-commerce site (10k+ SKUs). https://www.flagandbanner.com. As I have begun analyzing how to improve it I have discovered that we have thousands of urls that have uppercase characters. For instance: https://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/patriotic-paper-lanterns-string-lights.asp. This is inconsistently applied throughout the site. I directed our website vendor to fix the issue and they placed 301 redirects via a rule to the web.config file. Any url that contains an uppercase character now displays as a lowercase. However, as I use screaming frog to monitor our site, I see all these 301 redirects--thousands of them. The XML sitemap still shows the the uppercase versions. We have had indexing issues as well. So I'm wondering what is the most effective way to make sure that I'm not placing an extra burden on Googlebot when they index our site? Should I have just not cared about the uppercase issue and let it alone?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webrocket0 -
Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito1 -
Click Through Rate on Password Protected Pages
Hi Moz community, I have a website that has a large database with 800+ important pages, and want Google to know when people visit and stay on these pages. However, these pages are only accessible to people once they create an account with a password, and sign in. I know that since these pages are password protected, Google doesn't index them, but when our visitors stay for a while on our site browsing through our database, does this data get included in our CTR and Bounce Rate by Google? This is really important for Google to know about our database (that people are staying on our site for a while) for SEO purposes, so I wanted to know that if the CTR gets measured even though these pages aren't crawled. Thanks for the help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danstern0 -
How can I make sure Google is crawling a link from an iframe (video)?
Do they crawl backlinks from an iframe example from a Youtube video embedded in a blog post? TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zpm20140 -
Why is my Crawl Report Showing Thousands of Pages that Do Not Exist?
Hi, I just downloaded a Crawl Summary Report for a client's website. I am seeing THOUSANDS of duplicate page content errors. The overwhelming majority of them look something like this: ERROR: http://www.earlyinterventionsupport.com/resources/parentingtips/development/parentingtips/development/development/development/development/development/development/parentingtips/specialneeds/default.aspx This page doesn't exist and results in a 404 page. Why are these pages showing up? How do I get rid of them? Are they endangering the health of my site as a whole? Thank you, Jenna <colgroup><col width="1051"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JennaCMag
| |0