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.
Googlebot Crawl Rate causing site slowdown
-
I am hearing from my IT department that Googlebot is causing as massive slowdown/crash our site. We get 3.5 to 4 million pageviews a month and add 70-100 new articles on the website each day. We provide daily stock research and marke analysis, so its all high quality relevant content. Here are the crawl stats from WMT:
I have not worked with a lot of high volume high traffic sites before, but these crawl stats do not seem to be out of line. My team is getting pressure from the sysadmins to slow down the crawl rate, or block some or all of the site from GoogleBot.
Do these crawl stats seem in line with sites? Would slowing down crawl rates have a big effect on rankings?
Thanks
-
Similar to Michael, my IT team is saying Googlebot is causing performance issues - specifically during peak hours.
It was suggested that we consider using apache re-write rules to serve Googlebot a 503 during our peak hours to limit the impact. I found the stackoverflow thread (link below) in which John Muller seems to suggest this approach, but has anyone tried this?
-
Blocking googlebot is a quick and easy way to disappear from the Index. Not an option if you want Google to rank your site.
For smaller sites or ones with limited technologies, I sometimes recommend using a crawl-delay directive in robots.txt
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48620
But I agree with both Shane and Zachary, this doesn't seem like the long term answer to your problems. Your crawl stats don't seem out of line for a site of your size, and perhaps a better hardware configuration could help things out.
With 70 new articles each day, I'd want Google crawling my site as much as they pleased.
-
whatever Google's default is in GWT - It sets it for you.
You can change it, but it is not reccomended unless for a specific reason (such as Michael Lewis's specific scenario) even though, I am not completely sold that Gbot is what is causing the "dealbreaking" overhead.
-
what is the ideal setting on the crawler. i have been wondering about this for some time.
-
Hi,
Your admins saying that, is like someone saying "we need to shut the site down, we are getting to much traffic!" Common sys-admin response (fix it somewhere else)
4GB a day downloaded, is alot of Bot traffic, but it appears you are a "real time" site, that is probably actually helped and maybe even reliant on your high crawl rate....
I would upgrade hardware - or even look into some kind of off site cloud redundancy for failover (Hybrid)
I highly doubt that 4GB a day, is a "dealbreaker",but of course that is just based off the one image, and your admins probably have resource monitors - Maybe Varnish is an answer for static content to help lighten load???? Or CDN for file hosting to lighten bandwidth load?
Shane
-
We are hosting the site on our own hardware at a big colo. I know that we are upgrading servers but they will not be online until the end of July.
Thanks!
-
I wouldn't slow the crawl rate. A high crawl rate is good so that Google can keep their index of your website current.
The better solution is to reconsider your hardware and networking setup. Do you know how you are being hosted? From my own experience with a website of that size, a load balancer on two decent dedicated servers should handle the load without problems. Google crawling your pages shouldn't create noticeable overhead on the right setup.
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
-
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | Jan 13, 2017, 4:00 PM | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | May 7, 2015, 6:57 AM | thinkcreativegroup1 -
Schema, aggregate ratings and trustpilot
Hi! I'm looking to include rich snippets on some of my product sites, such as price etc. In addition, it would be nice to include our overall ratings (from Trustpilot) on the different pages.
Technical SEO | Apr 29, 2015, 4:49 AM | eyephone
However, I've been looking all over, and haven't really found a clear answer, as to if this is even in adherence with the Google guidelines. As it is our company overall, and not the specific products that are being rated, I have done it likes this (on product pages): name of organization
248
8,2
10. other product-specific information Would this be against guidelines?0 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | Mar 31, 2015, 11:06 AM | eglove0 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | Mar 13, 2012, 3:16 PM | askotzko0 -
When is the last time Google crawled my site
How do I tell the last time Google crawled my site. I found out it is not the "Cache" which I had thought it was.
Technical SEO | Feb 16, 2012, 7:06 AM | digitalops0 -
Google.ca is showing our US site instead of our Canada Site
When our Canadian users who search on google.ca for our brand (e.g. Travelocity, Travelocity hotels, etc.), the first few results our from our US site (travelocity.com) rather than our Canadian site (travelocity.ca). In Google Webmaster Tools, we've adjusted the geotargeting settings to focus on the appropriate locale, but the wrong country TLD is still coming up at the top via google.ca. What's the best way to ensure our Canadian site comes up instead of the US site on google.ca? Thanks, Tory Smith
Technical SEO | Jun 9, 2011, 5:12 PM | travelocitysearch
Travelocity0 -
Crawling image folders / crawl allowance
We recently removed /img and /imgp from our robots.txt file thus allowing googlebot to crawl our image folders. Not sure why we had these blocked in the first place, but we opened them up in response to an email from Google Product Search about not being able to crawl images - which can/has hurt our traffic from Google Shopping. My question is: will allowing Google to crawl our image files eat up our 'crawl allowance'? We wouldn't want Google to not crawl/index certain pages, and ding our organic traffic, because more of our allotted crawl bandwidth is getting chewed up crawling image files. Outside of the non-detailed crawl stat graphs from Webmaster Tools, what's the best way to check how frequently/ deeply our site is getting crawled? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | Apr 27, 2011, 1:21 AM | evoNick0