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.
Crawl Stats Decline After Site Launch (Pages Crawled Per Day, KB Downloaded Per Day)
-
Hi all,
I have been looking into this for about a month and haven't been able to figure out what is going on with this situation. We recently did a website re-design and moved from a separate mobile site to responsive. After the launch, I immediately noticed a decline in pages crawled per day and KB downloaded per day in the crawl stats. I expected the opposite to happen as I figured Google would be crawling more pages for a while to figure out the new site. There was also an increase in time spent downloading a page. This has went back down but the pages crawled has never went back up. Some notes about the re-design:
- URLs did not change
- Mobile URLs were redirected
- Images were moved from a subdomain (images.sitename.com) to Amazon S3
- Had an immediate decline in both organic and paid traffic (roughly 20-30% for each channel)
I have not been able to find any glaring issues in search console as indexation looks good, no spike in 404s, or mobile usability issues. Just wondering if anyone has an idea or insight into what caused the drop in pages crawled? Here is the robots.txt and attaching a photo of the crawl stats.
User-agent: ShopWiki Disallow: / User-agent: deepcrawl Disallow: / User-agent: Speedy Disallow: / User-agent: SLI_Systems_Indexer Disallow: / User-agent: Yandex Disallow: / User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: / User-agent: BrightEdge Crawler/1.0 (crawler@brightedge.com) Disallow: / User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Disallow: /cart/ Disallow: /compare/ ```[fSAOL0](https://ibb.co/fSAOL0)
-
Yea that's definitely tricky. I'm assuming you haven't taken out any load balancing that was previously in place between desktop and m. meaning your server is struggling a lot more? The Page Speed Insights tool can be good info but if possible I'd have a look at that user experience index to get an idea of how other users are experiencing the site.
A next port of call could be your server logs? Do you have any other subdomains which are performing differently in search console?
In terms of getting Google to crawl more, unfortunately at this point my instinct would be to keep trying to optimise the site to make it as crawl-friendly as possible and wait for Google to start crawling more. It does look like the original spike in time spent downloading has subsided a bit but it's still higher than it was. Without doing the maths, given that pages crawled and kilobytes downloaded have dropped, the level of slowdown may have persisted and the drop in that graph could have been caused by Google easing back. I'd keep working on making the site as efficient and consistent as possible and try to get that line tracking lower as an immediate tactic.
-
Hi Robin,
Thanks a lot for the reply. A lot of good information there.
- The crawl delay has been on the site as long as I have known so it was left in place just to minimize changes
- Have not changed any of the settings in Search Console. It has remained at "Let Google optimize for my site"
- Have not received the notification for mobile first indexing
- The redirects were one to one for the mobile site. I do not believe there are any redirect chains from those.
- The desktop pages remained roughly the same size but on a mobile device, pages are slightly heavier compared to the sepatate m dot site. The separate m dot site had a lot of content stripped out and was pretty bare to be fast. We introduced more image compression than we have ever done and also deferred image loading to make the user experience as fast as possible. The site scores in the 90s on Google's page speed insights tool.
- Yes, resizing based on viewport. Content is basically the same between devices. We have some information in accordions on product detail pages on and show fewer products on the grids on mobile.
- They are not the same images files but they are actually smaller than they were previously as we were not compressing them and using different sizes in different locations to minimize page weight.
I definitely lean towards it being performance related as in the crawl stats there seems to be a correlation between time spent downloading a page and the other two stats. I just wonder how you get Google to start crawling more once the performance is fixed or if they will figure it out.
-
Hi there, thanks for posting!
Sounds like an interesting one, some questions that come to mind which I'd just like to run through to make sure we're not missing anything;
- Why do you have Crawl-delay set for all user agents? Officially it's not something Google supports but the reason for that could be the cause of this
- Have you changed any settings in search console? There is a slider for how often you want Google to crawl a site
- Have you had the Search Console notification that you're now on the mobile-first index?
- When you redirected the mobile site, was it all one-to-one redirects? Is there any possibility you've introduced redirect chains?
- After the redesign - are the pages now significantly bigger (in terms of amount of data needed to fully load the page)? Are there any very large assets that are now on every page?
- When you say responsive, is it resizing based on viewport? How much duplication has been added to the page? Is there a bunch of content that is there for mobile but not loaded unless viewed from mobile (and vice versa)?
- When you moved the images, were they the same exact image files or might they now be the full-size image files?
This is just first blush so I could be off the mark but those graphs suggest to me that Google is having to work harder to crawl your pages and, as a result, is throttling the amount of time spent on your site. If the redesign or switch to responsive involved making the pages significantly "heavier" where that could be additional JavaScript, bigger images, more content etc. that could cause that effect. If you've got any sitespeed benchmarking in place you could have a look at that to see whether things have changed. Google also uses pagespeed as a ranking factor so that could explain the traffic drop.
The other thing to bear in mind is that combining the mobile and desktop sites was essentially a migration, particularly if you were on the mobile-first index. It may be that the traffic dip is less related to the crawl rate, but I understand why we'd make the connection there.
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
-
XML sitemap generator only crawling 20% of my site
Hi guys, I am trying to submit the most recent XML sitemap but the sitemap generator tools are only crawling about 20% of my site. The site carries around 150 pages and only 37 show up on tools like xml-sitemaps.com. My goal is to get all the important URLs we care about into the XML sitemap. How should I go about this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyEl0 -
Is it good or bad to add noindex for empty pages, which will get content dynamically after some days
We have followers, following, friends, etc pages for each user who creates account on our website. so when new user sign up, he may have 0 followers, 0 following and 0 friends, but over period of time he can get those lists go up. we have different pages for followers, following and friends which are allowed for google to index. When user don't have any followers/following/friends, those pages looks empty and we get issue of duplicate content and description too short. so is it better that we add noindex for those pages temporarily and remove noindex tag when there are at least 2 or more people on those pages. What are side effects of adding noindex when there is no data on those page or benefits of it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | swapnil120 -
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
Substantial difference between Number of Indexed Pages and Sitemap Pages
Hey there, I am doing a website audit at the moment. I've notices substantial differences in the number of pages indexed (search console), the number of pages in the sitemap and the number I am getting when I crawl the page with screamingfrog (see below). Would those discrepancies concern you? The website and its rankings seems fine otherwise. Total indexed: 2,360 (Search Consule)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online-Marketing-Guy
About 2,920 results (Google search "site:example.com")
Sitemap: 1,229 URLs
Screemingfrog Spider: 1,352 URLs Cheers,
Jochen0 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
After Server Migration - Crawling Gets slow and Dynamic Pages wherein Content changes are not getting Updated
Hello, I have just performed doing server migration 2 days back All's well with traffic moved to new servers But somehow - it seems that w.r.t previous host that on submitting a new article - it was getting indexed in minutes. Now even after submitting page for indexing - its taking bit of time in coming to Search Engines and some pages wherein content is daily updated - despite submitting for indexing - changes are not getting reflected Site name is - http://www.mycarhelpline.com Have checked in robots, meta tags, url structure - all remains well intact. No unknown errors reports through Google webmaster Could someone advise - is it normal - due to name server and ip address change and expect to correct it automatically or am i missing something Kindly advise in . Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Adding hreflang tags - better on each page, or the site map?
Hello, I am wondering if there seems to be a preference for adding hreflang tags (from this article). My client just changed their site from gTLDs to ccTLDs, and a few sites have taken a pretty big traffic hit. One issue is definitely the amount of redirects to the page, but I am also going to work with the developer to add hreflang tags. My question is - is it better to add them to the header of each page, or the site map, or both, or something else? Any other thoughts are appreciated. Our Australia site, which was at least findable using Australia Google before this relaunch, is not showing up, even when you search the company name directly. Thanks!Lauryn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john_marketade0 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0