Increase in pages crawled per day
-
What does it mean when GWT abruptly jump from 15k to 30k pages crawled per day?
I am used to see spikes, like 10k average and a couple of time per month 50k pages crawled.
But in this case 10 days ago moved from 15k to 30k per day and it's staying there. I know it's a good sign, the crawler is crawling more pages per day, so it's picking up changes more often, but I have no idea of why is doing it, what good signals usually drive google crawler to choose to increase the number of pages crawled per day?
Anyone knows?
-
Nice find Ryan.
-
Agreed. Especially since Google's own Gary Illyes respond to the following with:
How long is the delay between making it mobile friendly and it being reflected in the search results?
Illyes says “As soon as we discover it is mobile friendly, on a URL by URL basis, it will be updated.
Sounds like when you went responsive they double checked each URL to confirm. From: http://www.thesempost.com/googles-gary-illyes-qa-upcoming-mobile-ranking-signal-change/. Cheers!
-
I usually analyze backlinks with both gwt and ahrefs, and ahrefs also doesn't show any abnormally high DA backlink either.
Agree the responsive change is the most probable candidate, I have a couple of other websites I want to turn responsive before April 21st, that's an opportunity to test and see if that is the reason.
-
Ah, the responsive change could be a big part of it. You're probably getting crawls from the mobile crawler. GWT wouldn't be the best source for the recency on backlinks. I'd actually look for spikes via referrers in Analytics. GWT isn't always that responsive when reporting links. Still, it looks like the responsive redesign is a likely candidate for this, especially with Google's looming April 21st deadline.
-
Tw things I forgot to mention are:
- something like 2 weeks ago we turned the website responsive, could it be google mobile crawler is increasing the number of crawled pages, I have to analyze the logs to see if the requests are coming from google mobile crawler
- the total number of indexed pages didn't change, which make me wonder if a rise in the number of crawled pages per day is all that relevant
-
Hi Ryan,
- GWT (Search Traffic->Search Queries) shows a drop of 6% in impressions for brand based searches (google trends shows a similar pattern).
- GWT is not showing any recent backlink with an abnormally high DA.
- we actually had a couple of unusually high traffic from Facebook thanks to a couple of particularly successful post, but we are talking about a couple of spikes of just 5k visits and they both started after the rise of pages crawled per day.
If you have any other idea it's more than welcome, I wish I could understand the source of that change to be able to replicate it on other websites.
-
I am not sure I understand what you mean, that website has a total of 35k pages submitted through sitemap to GWT, of which only 8k are indexed. The total number of pages indexed have always been slowly increasing through time, it moved from 6k to 8k in the last couple of months, slowly with no spikes.
That's not the total number of pages served by the site, since dynamics search results page amount to around 150k total pages, we do not submit all of them in the sitemap on purpose, and GWT shows 70k pages as the total number of indexed pages.
I analyzed Google crawler activity through server logs in the past, it does pick a set of (apparently) random pages every night and does crawl them. I actually never analyzed what percentage of those pages are in the sitemap or not.
Internal link structure was built on purpose to try to favor ranking of pages we considered more important.
The point is we didn't change anything in the website structure recently. User generated content have been lowering duplicate pages count, slowly, through time, without any recent spike. We have a PR campaign which is increasing backlinks with an average rate of around 3 links per week, and we didn't have any high DA backlinks appearing in the last few weeks.
So I am wondering what made google crawler start crawling much more pages per day.
-
yes, I updated to parameters just before you posted
-
When you say URL variables do you mean query string variables like ?key=value
That is really good advice. You can check in your GWT. If you let google crawl and it runs in to a loop it will not index that section of your site. It would be costly for them.
-
I would also check you have not got a spike of URL parameters becoming available. I recently had a similar issue and although I had these set up in GWT the crawler was actively wasting its time on them. Once I added to robots the crawl level went back to 'normal'.
-
There could be several factors... maybe your brand based search is prompting Google to capture more of your site. Maybe you got a link from a very high authority site that prompts higher crawl volumes. Queries that prompt freshness related to your site could also spur on Google. It is a lot of guesswork, but can be whittled down some by a close look at Analytics and perhaps tomorrows OSE update (Fresh Web Explorer might provide some clue's in the meantime.) At least you're moving in the right direction. Cheers!
-
There are two variables in play and you are picking up on one.
If there are 1,000 pages on your website then Google may index all 1,000 if they are aware of all the pages. As you indicated, it is also Google's decision how many of your pages to index.
The second factor which is most likely the case in your situation is that Google only has two ways to index your pages. One is to submit a sitemap in GWT to all of your known pages. So Google would then have a choice to index all 1,000 as it would then be aware of their existence. However, it sounds like your website is relying on links. If you have 1,000 pages and a home page with one link leading to an about us page then Google is only aware of two pages on your entire website. Your website has to have a internal link structure that Google can crawl.
Imagine your website like a tree root structure. For Google to get to every page and index it then it has to have clear, defined, and easy access. Websites with a home page that links to a page A that then links to page B that then links to page C that then links to page D that then links to 500 pages can easily lose 500 pages if there is an obstruction between any of the pages that lead to page D. Because google can't crawl to page D to see all the pages on it.
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
-
What to do with temporary empty pages?
I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a and some footer text. I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000. So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is? Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.
Technical SEO | | marcuslind900 -
Joomla creating duplicate pages, then the duplicate page's canonical points to itself - help!
Using Joomla, every time I create an article a subsequent duplicate page is create, such as: /latest-news/218-image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface and /component/content/article?id=218:image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface The latter being the duplicate. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but the canonical tag on the duplicate is pointing to itself.. creating mayhem in Moz and Webmaster tools. We have hundreds of duplicates across our website and I'm very concerned with the impact this is having on our SEO! I've tried plugins such as sh404SEF and Styleware extensions, however to no avail. Can anyone help or know of any plugins to fix the canonicals?
Technical SEO | | JamesPearce0 -
What is Too Many On-Page Links?
in campaigns i see " Too Many On-Page Links " what is this ? can anyone please tell me ?
Technical SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
First Crawl Report
Just joined SEOMoz today and am slightly overwhelmed, but excited about learning loads from it. I've just received my Crawl Report and there is a
Technical SEO | | iainmoran
404 : UserPreemptionError:
http://www.iainmoran.com/comments/feed/ This is a WordPress site and I've no idea what the best course of action to take. I've done some searching on Google and a couple of sites suggest removing that url from within the robots.txt file. I'm using the Yoast Plugin which apparently creates a robots.txt file, but I can't see any way to edit it. Is there another solution for resolving the 404 error? Many thanks, Iain.0 -
Why are pages linked with URL parameters showing up as separate pages with duplicate content?
Only one page exists . . . Yet I link to the page with different URL parameters for tracking purposes and for some reason it is showing up as a separate page with duplicate content . . . Help? rpcIZ.png
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
I am trying to correct error report of duplicate page content. However I am unable to find in over 100 blogs the page which contains similar content to the page SEOmoz reported as having similar content is my only option to just dlete the blog page?
I am trying to correct duplicate content. However SEOmoz only reports and shows the page of duplicate content. I have 5 years worth of blogs and cannot find the duplicate page. Is my only option to just delete the page to improve my rankings. Brooke
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
Dealing with 404 pages
I built a blog on my root domain while I worked on another part of the site at .....co.uk/alpha I was really careful not to have any links go to alpha - but it seems google found and indexed it. The problem is that part of alpha was a copy of the blog - so now soon we have a lot of duplicate content. The /alpha part is now ready to be taken over to the root domain, the initial plan was to then delete /alpha. But now that its indexed I'm worried that Ill have all these 404 pages. I'm not sure what to do.. I know I can just do a 301 redirect for all those pages to go to the other ones in case a link comes on but I need to delete those pages as the server is already very slow. Or does a 301 redirect mean that I don't need those pages anymore? Will those pages still get indexed by google as separate pages? Please assist.
Technical SEO | | borderbound0 -
Canonical on ecommerce pages
I have seen some competitors using the nofollow tag as well as canonical on all refinements and sorts on their ecommerce pages. Example being if you went to their hard drive category page and refined by 500gb hard drives then that page would have a canonical element to send it back to hard drives page without the refinement. I see how this could be good for control indexation and the amount pages Google crawls, but do you see problems in using the canonical tag this way? Also I have seen competitors have category page descriptions (describing what that type of product is) on all pagenation and refinements (the exact same block of text on all of the pages). Would this be a duplicate content problem or is it not that big of a deal since the content is only on their site so they are only competiting with themselves. Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | Gordian0