Google crawl rate dropped after we activated CloudFront
-
Hello!
Previously we've been using Amazon CloudFront for our static content (js, css etc). But to be able to reduce load on our origin servers and to be able to give our international users a good user experience we decided to deliver a couple of our sites through CloudFront.
We noticed very nice drops in page load time, but when checking Google webmaster tools we noticed that all CloudFront-activated sites got a huge drop in pages crawled per day (from avg ~3500 to ~150). Also one of the sites have issues with the Google sitemaps (just marked as "Pending" in GWT) and no new pages or updated pages seems to be updated in the Google SERP. The rest of the sites gets some updates on the Google SERP, but very few compared to before CloudFront activation.
Is there anybody here who have experience in full site delivery through CloudFront (or other CDNs) and effects on SEO/Google? Would be very glad for any insights or suggestions. The risk is that we need to remove CloudFront if this just continues.
-
My very best educated guess (after talking with dev friends here at Moz) is that CloudFront is supposed to be used for long-term storage. This means the content isn't expected to change frequently. This is great for images and other static things. However, this is also a signal to Google not to crawl your site as often as it won't be changing that often.
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
-
Why Dropping pages from SERPS?
Our website for my olansi company in London, China has hundreds of pages dedicated to every service we provide to China local areas. The total number of pages is approximately 100. Google caters pretty well for long-tail searches when it indexes all these pages, so we usually get a fair amount of traffic when this happens. However, Google occasionally drops most of our indexed pages from search engine results for a few days or weeks at a time - for example, Google is currently indexing 60 pages while last week it was back at 100. Can you tell me why this happens? When these pages don't display, we lose a lot of organic traffic. What are we doing wrong? Site url:https://www.olanside.com
Technical SEO | | sesahoda0 -
Google webmaster is not crawling links and site cache still in old date
Hi guys, I have been trying to get my page indexed in Google with new title and descriptions but it is not getting indexed. I have checked in many tools but no useful. Can you please tell me what could be the issue? Even I have set up And Google webmaster is not crawling links I have built so far. Few links are indexed but others do not. Why this is happening. My url is: https://www.paydaysunny.com thanks
Technical SEO | | ksmith880 -
Google dropping pages from SERPs even though indexed and cached. (Shift over to https suspected.)
Anybody know why pages that have previously been indexed - and that are still present in Google's cache - are now not appearing in Google SERPs? All the usual suspects - noindex, robots, duplication filter, 301s - have been ruled out. We shifted our site over from http to https last week and it appears to have started then, although we have also been playing around with our navigation structure a bit too. Here are a few examples... Example 1: Live URL: https://www.normanrecords.com/records/149002-memory-drawings-there-is-no-perfect-place Cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.normanrecords.com/records/149002-memory-drawings-there-is-no-perfect-place SERP (1): https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=memory+drawings+there+is+no+perfect+place SERP (2): https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=memory+drawings+there+is+no+perfect+place+site%3Awww.normanrecords.com Example 2: SERP: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=deaf+center+recount+site%3Awww.normanrecords.com Live URL: https://www.normanrecords.com/records/149001-deaf-center-recount- Cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.normanrecords.com/records/149001-deaf-center-recount- These are pages that have been linked to from our homepage (Moz PA of 68) prominently for days, are present and correct in our sitemap (https://www.normanrecords.com/catalogue_sitemap.xml), have unique content, have decent on-page optimisation, etc. etc. We moved over to https on 11 Aug. There were some initial wobbles (e.g. 301s from normanrecords.com to www.normanrecords.com got caught up in a nasty loop due to the conflicting 301 from http to https) but these were quickly sorted (i.e. spotted and resolved within minutes). There have been some other changes made to the structure of the site (e.g. a reduction in the navigation options) but nothing I know of that would cause pages to drop like this. For the first example (Memory Drawings) we were ranking on the first page right up until this morning and have been receiving Google traffic for it ever since it was added to the site on 4 Aug. Any help very much appreciated! At the very end of my tether / understanding here... Cheers, Nathon
Technical SEO | | nathonraine0 -
Crawl rate
Hello, In google WMT my site has the following message. <form class="form" action="/webmasters/tools/settings-ac?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.prom-hairstyles.org/&siteUrl=http://www.prom-hairstyles.org/&hl=en" method="POST">Your site has been assigned special crawl rate settings. You will not be able to change the crawl rate.Why would this be?A bit of backgound - this site was hammered by Penguin or maybe panda but seems to be dragging itself back up (maybe) but has dropped from several thousand visitors/day to 100 or so.Cheers,Ian</form>
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Blocking https from being crawled
I have an ecommerce site where https is being crawled for some pages. Wondering if the below solution will fix the issue www.example.com will be my domain In the nav there is a login page www.example.com/login which is redirecting to the https://www.example.com/login If I just disallowed /login in the robots file wouldn't it not follow the redirect and index that stuff? The redirect part is what I am questioning.
Technical SEO | | Sean_Dawes0 -
Google Search memory
Hi we have had the following statement from a member of our Japan office with regards google displaying search results, would anyone be able to give us a definitive answer on this. Google remembers previous non-mobile related searches For example, we already know that we come up on the first page if you select “kaigai keitai” (mobile phone for use abroad) and “UK” where as we don’t for searches where you replace the UK with the US or other countries. This means that if a customer, for example, does a search just on the UK e.g. using words like UK travel, London, millennium dome, etc. and then does a separate search just using the words “kaigai keitai” that google could show us as a link on the first page. However, if an individual did a search on Paris, France, Eiffel Tower, and then did a search for “kaigai keitai”, our link might not appear on the page. I don’t know if we have tested this already, but Google seems to have a very long “memory” and I could see this kind of aspect of Google resulting in us missing significant business from people going to the US, France, Italy, etc. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | -Al-0 -
Will a "blog=example "parameter at the end of my URLs affect google's crawling them?
For example, I'm wondering if www.example.com/blog/blog-post is better than www.example.com/blog/blog-post?blog=example? I'm currently using the www.example.com/blog/blog-post?blog=example structure as our canonical page for content. I'm also wondering, if the parameter doesn't affect crawling, if it would hurt rankings in any way. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Intridea0 -
.co what is it? Do I need it? Does Google hate it?
Do .com rank better then .co? I don't know much about .co so I'm just looking for some insight! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | christinarule0