Googlebot activity is massively down

[imrubbish]

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

1bVMvZD

[MikeTek]

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

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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

[imrubbish]

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

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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