Googlebot activity is massively down
-
Hi guys and girls,
around the 3rd of march it started to drop off and it has gone from 7000 to only 700.
Kilobytes and time spent are both lower which is good but can someone explain if i should be concerned by such a drastic drop in googlebot activity?
Thank you
Jon
-
Hi Jon,
As Andy suggested, I wouldn't worry about this unless you see it correlating to a significant drop in traffic on your site.
We see a lot of noise in these activity reports, unfortunately, and rarely do they directly correlate to significant losses/gains in traffic/business.
Not to suggest nothing is wrong - there may indeed be technical or other issues involved - but without a thorough crawl of the site and review of all potential issues, it'll be tough for any of the Q&A participants to pinpoint an issue.
One thing I would consider: it seems there are only 330 indexed pages on the site. This being the case, a lower number of pages crawled and kilobytes downloaded may reflect a better understanding of your site architecture by Google, or perhaps you've recently cleaned up some extraneous URLs / URL Parameters / etc? In other words, why would you want Google crawling 7k pages on your site daily, if you have nowhere near 7k pages that matter for organic search?
Again, I'd keep a close eye on your organic search traffic (Intelligence Events would be good to set up for this), but these activity reports alone don't necessarily correlate to changes in search visibility - there's as good a chance this indicates Google is simply crawling your site more efficiently than before.
Best,
Mike -
The only thing that could have really happened, is if pages had a noindex / nofollow added to them. This could cause problems like this, but it doesn't sound like this has happened.
If you have a sitemap on the site, make sure it is up to date and then resubmit it to Google again, just to make sure they can see everything.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
No i dont believe so and analytics doesnt show any decrease in visitors from Search. We use Magento and Technical SEO changes i would not have a clue how to work on.
I havent touched anything, my developer is not good at all with regards to technical SEO but i cant see what he could have done to mess anything up.
Its just alarming to go from 7000 to 700 almost overnight
-
Hi Jon,
I guess the first question is, have any changes been made to the site recently? Are there pages that might have been changed to stop Google from crawling them?
Do you have anything to be concerned about? I would look at your traffic and visitors for the answer to that one and if you see a drop in either / both at around the same time, then yes, I would be concerned and then start digging deeper.
-Andy
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
-
Seeing massive spikes in direct traffic with 100% bounce rates
Hi all, Looking through Analytics yesterday, I saw that my website had a huge increase in direct traffic in sessions. However, they apparently spent 0 seconds on the website in total so that raised plenty of red flags. Does anyone have reasons why this might be? Spam or bug? Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Whittie0 -
Apple.com showing in Google Analytics "My Top Active Pages" - Why?
Hi Mozzers This has more than likely been asked before but my searches have left me empty handed so I have asked on here ( sorry! ) Please see attached screenshot, do you have any idea why apple.com is showing in my top pages? I'm just curious more than anything as this isn't the first time I've noticed it. Anybody know? Happy Friday people, cheers Jamie CiTCA5b.png
Reporting & Analytics | | SanjidaKazi1 -
No Google Analytics code on page BUT reporting is active
How could Google Analytics be reporting data if my pages don't have the GA code on them? Mike
Reporting & Analytics | | Mike_c0 -
Finding an Explanation for a Massive Spike in Organic Search Traffic
Hi, I watch analytics on a website (for a friend's business) that is reasonably stagnant, which just experienced a massive spike in search traffic for no explainable reason. The organic search engine traffic had always been steady, but about two months ago, organic search traffic started rising slowly. I checked OSE & a few other tools, but couldn't find any massive source of gained links or other explanations - just the usual occasional blog post about the company. I got in touch with my friend to see if maybe they'd gone with a competitor or something else, but he also had no idea (and even if he wasn't being honest with me, we still should've been able to spot links or social metrics or something!) Then, yesterday, their organic search traffic just tripled. The crazy thing is, it's not from one keyword: Every search term, and (not provided) essentially went up 200-400%. And I have no freaking idea why. No large gain of links. No website editing. The only possible explanation I thought up is maybe one of their competitors got knocked out, but I doubt that would cause such a stratospheric rise. So figured I'd turn to y'all. Any ideas on what might be causing such wonderful results? Anyone have any good tips on figuring out why a website could all of a sudden be doing incredibly? Analytics chart is below for the curious, and thanks in advance for any ideas / tips! nQHrscw.png
Reporting & Analytics | | FlynnZaiger0 -
Googlebot Visit Time & Date Stamps
I know that in Google Webmaster Central, we can see general Googlebot crawl stats based on dates. Our site is crawled daily. We're trying to find out the time of day Googlebot visits our site - know of any ways to do this or tools out there?
Reporting & Analytics | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Increase in 'Googlebot-Image' visits in analytics
Hi, I noticed a substantial increase in 'Googlebot-Image' visits data under Technology>Browser & OS in Google analytics for a few clients. Is this a bug? Are there any known fixes apart from just adding a filter to exclude the data? Regards Niladri
Reporting & Analytics | | neildomain0 -
Massive raise and drop in keyword ranking
2 weeks ago I had a massive spike in keyword rankings 99 keyword went up. It was a quite happy week. the week later all keywords that went up dropped down to the same positions before the spike. now I have the same situation. this is the happy week with a very high spike. Anybody got a clue what is going on ?
Reporting & Analytics | | interelectronix0 -
Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site??? How Do I resolve this?
I am working on a site with over 30 million pages. Every time I get about One Million indexed I get a Message in the Google Webmasters Tools saying "Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site" The indexing then starts dropping like a Rock. I need to get the site indexed. Please Help!
Reporting & Analytics | | GlobalFlex0