How can I tell Google, that a page has not changed?
-
Hello,
we have a website with many thousands of pages. Some of them change frequently, some never. Our problem is, that googlebot is generating way too much traffic. Half of our page views are generated by googlebot.
We would like to tell googlebot, to stop crawling pages that never change. This one for instance:
http://www.prinz.de/party/partybilder/bilder-party-pics,412598,9545978-1,VnPartypics.html
As you can see, there is almost no content on the page and the picture will never change.So I am wondering, if it makes sense to tell google that there is no need to come back.
The following header fields might be relevant. Currently our webserver answers with the following headers:
Cache-Control:
no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0, public
Pragma:no-cache
Expires:Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Does Google honor these fields? Should we remove no-cache, must-revalidate, pragma: no-cache and set expires e.g. to 30 days in the future?
I also read, that a webpage that has not changed, should answer with 304 instead of 200. Does it make sense to implement that? Unfortunatly that would be quite hard for us.
Maybe Google would also spend more time then on pages that actually changed, instead of wasting it on unchanged pages.
Do you have any other suggestions, how we can reduce the traffic of google bot on unrelevant pages?
Thanks for your help
Cord
-
Unfortunately, I don't think there are many reliable options, in the sense that Google will always honor them. I don't think they gauge crawl frequency by the "expires" field - or, at least, it carries very little weight. As John and Rob mentioned, you can set the "changefreq" in the XML sitemap, but again, that's just a hint to Google. They seem to frequently ignore it.
If it's really critical, a 304 probably is a stronger signal, but I suspect even that's hit or miss. I've never seen a site implement it on a large scale (100s or 1000s of pages), so I can't speak to that.
Two broader questions/comments:
(1) If you currently list all of these pages in your XML sitemap, consider taking them out. The XML sitemap doesn't have to contain every page on your site, and in many cases, I think it shouldn't. If you list these pages, you're basically telling Google to re-crawl them (regardless of the changefreq setting).
(2) You may have overly complex crawl paths. In other words, it may not be the quantity of pages that's at issue, but how Google accesses those pages. They could be getting stuck in a loop, etc. It's going to take some research on a large site, but it'd be worth running a desktop crawler like Xenu or Screaming Frog. This could represent a site architecture problem (from an SEO standpoint).
(3) Should all of these pages even be indexed at all, especially as time passes? More and more (especially post-Panda), more indexed pages is often worse. If Googlebot is really hitting you that hard, it might be time to canonicalize some older content or 301-redirect it to newer, more relevant content. If it's not active at all, you could even NOINDEX or 404 it.
-
Thanks for the answers so far. The tips are not really solving my problems yet, though: I don't want to set down general crawling speed in the webmaster tools, because pages that frequently change should also be crawled frequently. We do have XML Sitemaps, although we did not include these picture pages, as in our example. There are ten- maybe houndreds- of thousands of these pages. If everyone agrees on this, we can include these pages in our XML Sitemaps of course. Using "meta refresh" to indicate, that the page never changed, seems a bit odd to me. But I'll look into it.
But what about the http headers, I asked about? Does anyone have any ideas on that?
-
Your best bet is to build an Excel report using a crawl tool (like Xenu, Frog, Moz, etc), and export that data. Then look to map out the pages you want to log and mark as 'not changing'.
Make sure to built (or have a functioning XML sitemap file) for the site, and as John said, state which URL's NEVER change. Over time, this will tell googlebot that it isn't neccessary yo crawl those page URL's as they never change.
You could also place a META REFRESH tag on those individual pages, and set that to never as well.
Hope some of this helps! Cheers
-
If you have Google Webmaster Tools set up, go to Site configuration > Settings, and you can set a custom crawl rate for you site. That will change it site-wide, so if you have other pages that change frequently, that might not be so great for you.
Another thing you could try is generate a sitemap, and set a change frequency of never (or yearly) for all of the pages you don't expect to change. That also might slow down Google's crawl rate of those pages.
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
-
Best way to change URL for already ranking pages
Hello. I have a lot of pages that I'm optimising. The ones I'm focusing on right now is already ranking, but the URLs could be better (they don't include the keywords right now). However I'm worried that if I change the URLs they will drop in rankings or have to start over. I would of course set up 301 redirect, but is there more I need to do? What is the best way to change URL for already ranking pages?
Technical SEO | | GoMentor0 -
How can I tell Google not to index a portion of a webpage?
I'm working with an ecommerce site that has many product descriptions for various brands that are important to have but are all straight duplicates. I'm looking for some type of tag tht can be implemented to prevent Google from seeing these as duplicates while still allowing the page to rank in the index. I thought I had found it with Googleoff, googleon tag but it appears that this is only used with the google appliance hardware.
Technical SEO | | bradwayland0 -
Google Not Recognizing Domain Name Change
It has been over a month since we have switch https://www.iwdextensions.com
Technical SEO | | lsujoe
to
https://www.iwdagency.com/extensions/ Yet Google is still ranking the old domain name in their search results. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=iwd extensions Are we doing something wrong or does it take Google more than a month to update their results for this type of change? We have 301 redirected the old url to the new one and submitted a domain name change in GWT. Let me know your thoughts!0 -
How to change the woocommerce product page permalink
Sorry Posting it again. How I can change the product URL structure. Please let me know how to fix woocommerce permalink in wordpress. My current URL is http://www.ayurjeewan.com/product/divya-ashmarihar-kwath and I want to like (only post name) http://www.ayurjeewan.com/divya-ashmarihar-kwath Attached is the screenshot of option available. qa2hZMP.jpg
Technical SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
Can't get Google to Index .pdf in wp-content folder
We created an indepth case study/survey for a legal client and can't get Google to crawl the PDF which is hosted on Wordpress in the wp-content folder. It is linked to heavily from nearly all pages of the site by a global sidebar. Am I missing something obvious as to why Google won't crawl this PDF? We can't get much value from it unless it gets indexed. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks! Here is the PDF itself:
Technical SEO | | inboundauthority
http://www.billbonebikelaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Whitepaper-Drivers-vs-cyclists-Floridas-Struggle-to-share-the-road.pdf Here is the page it is linked from:
http://www.billbonebikelaw.com/resources/drivers-vs-cyclists-study/0 -
Google Alerts almost never alerts me to my own pages being added.
Hello All, So i have a fairly decent blog http://www.symbolphoto.com/bl*g/ * replace with o. However, i'm posting to it once/twice a week and i never ever see in my google alerts my pages being included. I do include my search terms in my pages "Bston Wedding Photgrapher" yet, my page is never included. What on earth am i doing wrong? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! -Brendan
Technical SEO | | symbolphoto0 -
Changed cms - google indexes old and new pages
Hello again, after posting below problem I have received this answer and changed sitemap name Still I receive many duplicate titles and metas as google still compares old urls to new ones and sees duplicate title and description.... we have redirectged all pages properly we have change sitemap name and new sitemap is listed in webmastertools - old sitemap includes ONLY new sitemap files.... When you deleted the old sitemap and created a new one, did you use the same sitemap xml filename? They will still try to crawl old URLs that were in your previous sitemap (even if they aren't listed in the new one) until they receive a 404 response from the original sitemap. If anone can give me an idea why after 3 month google still lists the old urls I'd be more than happy thanks a lot Hello, We have changed cms for our multiple language website and redirected all odl URl's properly to new cms which is working just fine.
Technical SEO | | Tit
Right after the first crawl almost 4 weeks ago we saw in google webmaster tool and SEO MOZ that google indexes for almost every singlepage the old URL as well and the new one and sends us for this duplicate metatags.
We deleted the old sitemap and uploaded the new and thought that google then will not index the old URL's anymore. But we still see a huge amount of duplicate metatags. Does anyone know what else we can do, so google doe snot index the old url's anymore but only the new ones? Thanks so much Michelle0 -
Getting Google to index new pages
I have a site, called SiteB that has 200 pages of new, unique content. I made a table of contents (TOC) page on SiteB that points to about 50 pages of SiteB content. I would like to get SiteB's TOC page crawled and indexed by Google, as well as all the pages it points to. I submitted the TOC to Pingler 24 hours ago and from the logs I see the Googlebot visited the TOC page but it did not crawl any of the 50 pages that are linked to from the TOC. I do not have a robots.txt file on SiteB. There are no robot meta tags (nofollow, noindex). There are no 'rel=nofollow' attributes on the links. Why would Google crawl the TOC (when I Pinglered it) but not crawl any of the links on that page? One other fact, and I don't know if this matters, but SiteB lives on a subdomain and the URLs contain numbers, like this: http://subdomain.domain.com/category/34404 Yes, I know that the number part is suboptimal from an SEO point of view. I'm working on that, too. But first wanted to figure out why Google isn't crawling the TOC. The site is new and so hasn't been penalized by Google. Thanks for any ideas...
Technical SEO | | scanlin0