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.
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
-
Crawl Depth improvements
Hi I'm checking the crawl depth report in SEM rush, and looking at pages which are 4+ clicks away. I have a lot of product pages which fall into this category. Does anyone know the impact of this? Will they never be found by Google? If there is anything in there I want to rank, I'm guessing the course of action is to move the page so it takes less clicks to get there? How important is the crawl budget and depth for SEO? I'm just starting to look into this subject Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Shouldn't Lower Bounce Rate Correlate into Greater Click Thru Rate for a Web Site?
Greetings: I run a real estate web site in New York City with about 650 pages out of which 330 are property listing pages. About 250 of those listing pages contain less than 150 words of content. In late August I set about 250 of the listing pages that generated the least traffic (generally corresponding to those with the least content) to "no-index, follow". Now Google has removed those pages from their index. The overall bounce rate for the site has been reduced from about 69% to about 64% since the removal of these low quality listing pages. However the click thru rate has not improved and is stuck at about 2.2 pages per visitor. Shouldn't the click thru rate improve if the bounce rate goes own? Am I missing something? Also, is a lower bounce rate something that Google will take into account when calculating rank? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Can spiders crawl javascript navigation now?
I was reading Danny Dover's book and decided to try some websites and so far everyone I have looked at has had navigation that does not work with disabled javascript. Is this still as important as it was at the time of publish (2011)? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Will a disclaimer affect Crawling?
Hello everyone! My German users will have to get a disclaimer according to German laws, now my question is the following: Will a disclaimer affect crawling? What's the best practice to have regarding this? Should I have special care in this? What's the best disclaimer technique? A Plain HTML page? Something overlapping the site? Thank you all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NelsonF0 -
Webmaster tools 404
Hey, I'm getting a soft 404 error on a webpage that has content and is deferentially not a 404. We've redirect a load of urls to the web page. The url has parameters which was used before the redirect but are no longer used on by the new url, these parameters have been carried over in the redirect. Is this whats causing the soft 404 error or is there another problem that may need addressing? Also a canonical has been set on the webpage. Thanks, Luke.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey1 -
Does Google crawl and spider for other links in rel=canonical pages?
When you add rel=canonical to the page, will Google still crawl your page for content and discover new links in that page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReferralCandy0 -
Should i remove sitemap from the mainsite at a webshop (footer link) and only submit .XML in Webmaster tools?
Case: Webshop with over 2000 products. I want to make a logical sitemap for Google to follow. What is best practice at this field? Should i remove the on-page sitemap there is in html with links (is shown as a footer link called "sitemap") and only have the domain.com/sitemap.xml ? Links for great articles about making sitemaps are appreciated to. The system is Magento, if that changes anything.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mickelp0 -
EBay ratings on site rich snippets
Hi I run an e-commerce site and we also sell via eBay. Our eBay feedback is currently around 4000 positive reviews. I know you you can (potentially) display star ratings in the search results using rich snippets - my question is do you think it is acceptable to display your eBay ratings on your website using rich snippets? Regards Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | windowtint0