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
-
My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages.
Hello, My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages. I have contacted my theme company but not sure what could have done this. Any ideas? The original posts/pages are still correct and working it just looks like it did duplicates and added void(0 to the end of each post/page. Questions: There is no way to undo this correct? Do I have to do a redirect on each of these? Will this hurt my rankings and domain authority? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Wade
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neverenoughmusic.com0 -
Redirecting homepage to internal page (2nd Tier page)
We are planning to experiment redirecting our homepage to one of the 2nd tier page. I mean....example.com to example.com/page. We need this page to rank well, but it doesn't have much internal links or external back-links, so we opt for this redirect. Advantage with this page is, it has "keyword" we want to rank for in URL. "page" in example.com/page. Will this help or hurt us in SEO? I think we are missing keyword in our root domain, so interested to highlight this page. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Multiple pages optimised for the same keywords but pages are functionally different and visually different
Hi MOZ community! We're wondering what the implications would be on organic ranking by having 2 pages, which have quite different functionality were optimised for the same keywords. So, for example, one of the pages in question is
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
https://www.whichledlight.com/categories/led-spotlights
and the other page is
https://www.whichledlight.com/t/led-spotlights both of these pages are basically geared towards the keyword led spotlights the first link essentially shows the options for led spotlights, the different kind of fittings available, and the second link is a product search / results page for all products that are spotlights. We're wondering what the implications of this could be, as we are currently looking to improve the ranking for the site particularly for this keyword. Is this even safe to do? Especially since we're at the bottom of the hill of climbing the ranking ladder of this keyword. Give us a shout if you want any more detail on this to answer more easily 🙂0 -
Crawled page count in Search console
Hi Guys, I'm working on a project (premium-hookahs.nl) where I stumble upon a situation I can’t address. Attached is a screenshot of the crawled pages in Search Console. History: Doing to technical difficulties this webshop didn’t always no index filterpages resulting in thousands of duplicated pages. In reality this webshops has less than 1000 individual pages. At this point we took the following steps to result this: Noindex filterpages. Exclude those filterspages in Search Console and robots.txt. Canonical the filterpages to the relevant categoriepages. This however didn’t result in Google crawling less pages. Although the implementation wasn’t always sound (technical problems during updates) I’m sure this setup has been the same for the last two weeks. Personally I expected a drop of crawled pages but they are still sky high. Can’t imagine Google visits this site 40 times a day. To complicate the situation: We’re running an experiment to gain positions on around 250 long term searches. A few filters will be indexed (size, color, number of hoses and flavors) and three of them can be combined. This results in around 250 extra pages. Meta titles, descriptions, h1 and texts are unique as well. Questions: - Excluding in robots.txt should result in Google not crawling those pages right? - Is this number of crawled pages normal for a website with around 1000 unique pages? - What am I missing? BxlESTT
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bob_van_Biezen0 -
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 -
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs? I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site. Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Domain Authority: 23, Page Authority: 33, Can My Site Still Rank?
Greetings: Our New York City commercial real estate site is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Key MOZ metric are as follows: Domain Authority: 23
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Page Authority: 33
28 Root Domains linking to the site
179 Total Links. In the last six months domain authority, page authority, domains linking to the site have declined. We have focused on removing duplicate content and low quality links which may have had a negative impact on the above metrics. Our ranking has dropped greatly in the last two months. Could it be due to the above metrics? These numbers seem pretty bad. How can I reverse without engaging in any black hat behavior that could work against me in the future? Ideas?
Thanks, Alan Rosinsky0 -
Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages
Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann0