Should we use Google's crawl delay setting?
-
We’ve been noticing a huge uptick in Google’s spidering lately, and along with it a notable worsening of render times.
Yesterday, for example, Google spidered our site at a rate of 30:1 (google spider vs. organic traffic.) So in other words, for every organic page request, Google hits the site 30 times.
Our render times have lengthened to an avg. of 2 seconds (and up to 2.5 seconds). Before this renewed interest Google has taken in us we were seeing closer to one second average render times, and often half of that.
A year ago, the ratio of Spider to Organic was between 6:1 and 10:1.
Is requesting a crawl-delay from Googlebot a viable option?
Our goal would be only to reduce Googlebot traffic, and hopefully improve render times and organic traffic.
Thanks,
Trisha
-
Unfortunately you can't change crawl settings for Google in a robots.txt file, they just ignore it. The best way to rate limit them is using custom Crawl settings in Google Webmaster Tools. (look under Site configuration > Settings)
You also might want to consider using your loadbalancer to direct Google (and other search engines) to a "condomised" group of servers (app, db, cache, search) thereby ensuring your users arent inadvertantly hit by perfomance issues caused by over zealous bot crawling.
-
We're a publisher, which means that as an industry our normal render times are always at the top of the chart. Ads are notoriously slow to load, and that's how we earn our keep. These results are bad, though, even for publishing.
We're serving millions of uniques a month, on a bank of dedicated servers hosted off site, load balanced, etc.
-
more info on that here: http://www.robotstxt.org/
-
Wow! those are really high render times. Have you considered perhaps moving to another webserver? NginX is pretty damm fast, and could probably get those render times down. Also, are you on a shared host? or is this a dedicated server?
What you're looking for is the robots.txt file though, and you want to add some lines like this:
User-agent: * Disallow: Crawl-Delay: 10 User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: / User-agent: Ask Jeeves Crawl-Delay: 120 User-agent: Teoma Disallow: /html/ Crawl-Delay: 120
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
-
Server Connection Error when using Google Speed Test Insight and GTMetrix
Hi Guys, Recently got into the issue when testing load speed of my website (https://solvid.co.uk). Occasionally, Google Speed Insights gives me a server connection error which states _"PageSpeed was unable to connect to the server. Ensure that you are using the correct protocol (_http vs https), the page loads in a browser, and is accessible on the public internet." Also, GTMetrix gives me an error as well, which states the following: "An error occurred fetching the page: HTTPS error: SSl connect attempt failed" All of my redirects seem to be set-up correctly as well as the SSL certificate. I've contacted my hosting provider (godaddy), they are saying that everything is fine with the server and the installation. Also, tried in different browsers in incognito mode, still gives me the same error. Until yesterday I haven't had such a problem. I've also attached the error screenshot links. I would really appreciate your help! Dmytro UxchPYR M52iPDf
Technical SEO | | solvid1 -
What's Moz's Strategy behind their blog main categories?
I've only just noticed that the Moz' blog categories have been moved within a pull down menu. See it underneath : 'Explore Posts by Category' on any blog page. This means that the whole list of categories under that pull-down is not crawlable by bots, and therefore no link-juice flows down onto those category pages. I imagine that the main drive behind that move is to sculpt page rank so that the business/money pages or areas of the website get greater link equity as opposed to just wasting it all throwing it down to the many categories ? it'd be good to hear about more from Rand or anyone in his team as to how they came onto engineering this and why. One of the things I wonder is: with the sheer amount of content that Moz produces, is it possible to contemplate an effective technical architecture such as that? I know they do a great job at interlinking content from one post onto another, so effectively one can argue that that kind of supersedes the need for hierarchical page rank distribution via categories... but I wonder : "is it working better this way vs having crawlable blog category links on the blog section? have they performed tests" some insights or further info on this from Moz would be very welcome. thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | carralon
David0 -
Nofollow links appear to be still included in SEOMOZ crawl and Google
I have added the nofollow tag to links throughout my site to hide duplicate content from Google but these pages are still being shown in my SEOMOZ crawl. I also fetched an example page with the Googlebot within Webmaster tools and it showed all nofollow links. An example is http://www.adventurepeaks.com/news All News tags have nofollow but each tag is appearing in my SEOMOZ crawl report as duplicate content. Any suggestions on whether this is a problem or if i have applied the tag incorrectly? Many thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | adventure340 -
I'm redesigning a website which will have a new URL format. What's the best way to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones? Is there an automated, fast way to do this?
For example, the new URL will be: https://oregonoptimalhealth.com/about_us.html while the old one's were like this: http://www.oregonoptimalhealth.com/home/ooh/smartlist_1/services.html I have redirect almost 100 old pages to the correct new page. What's the best and easiest way to do this?
Technical SEO | | PolarisMarketing0 -
Is Over use of Twitter to link back to your website affect google rankings
Having a debate here that needs to be settled. A friend is using twitter to link back to his site but is falling down the google rankings. I think that he is over using and creating double content which looks like a robot . Can any body elsse explain this Better Please Thanks in advance for your help
Technical SEO | | Feily0 -
About Bot's IP
Hi, one of my customers had probably block the IP of SEOMOZ's bot. Could you give me : IP User-agent's name thks for helping me 😉
Technical SEO | | dawa1 -
Removing a site from Google's index
We have a site we'd like to have pulled from Google's index. Back in late June, we disallowed robot access to the site through the robots.txt file and added a robots meta tag with "no index,no follow" commands. The expectation was that Google would eventually crawl the site and remove it from the index in response to those tags. The problem is that Google hasn't come back to crawl the site since late May. Is there a way to speed up this process and communicate to Google that we want the entire site out of the index, or do we just have to wait until it's eventually crawled again?
Technical SEO | | issuebasedmedia0 -
Why is this url showing as "not crawled" on opensiteexplorer, but still showing up in Google's index?
The below url is showing up as "not crawled" on opensitexplorer.com, but when you google the title tag "Joel Roberts, Our Family Doctors - Doctor in Clearwater, FL" it is showing up in the Google index. Can you explain why this is happening? Thank you http://doctor.webmd.com/physician_finder/profile.aspx?sponsor=core&pid=14ef09dd-e216-4369-99d3-460aa3c4f1ce
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0