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
-
Will multiple internal links with the same anchor text hurt a site's ranking?
Hello, I just watched this video from the Google Webmasters channel at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ My question: If a site is built up on subdomains, will linking the different subdomains with exact anchor text hurt the site's ranking? Thanks
Technical SEO | | arnoldwender0 -
What's another good SEO plugin for WordPress besides Yoast?
I know most people typically use Yoast, we use it on our sites, but we have one site where Yoast is causing a conflict. I wanted to investigate some other options and see what the best solution may be. Anyone else have an effective plugin they like?
Technical SEO | | AdamWormann0 -
New website's ranking dropped
Hi, Im working on brand new website i didn't even start my link building yet, just added to local directories i slowly started getting my ranking on 3rd page of Google then few weeks ago my ranking fell for all the keywords so now the website doesn't even rank on 10th page. Its been like this for a few weeks now. Here's the website Screenshot http://screencast.com/t/wDWk8sxLw Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | mezozcorp0 -
How do SE's see abbreviated queries.
Do search engines pay attention to periods in abbreviated queries? If I use Mt. Bachelor all over my site, would SE's not rank my site well for queries that use Mt Bachelor?
Technical SEO | | Shawn_Huber0 -
What's the latest on Title Tags?
What is the latest on what Google is looking for? Keyword one, Keyword two? Sentences with the Keyword in them?
Technical SEO | | netviper0 -
Has Google stopped rendering author snippets on SERP pages if the author's G+ page is not actively updated?
Working with a site that has multiple authors and author microformat enabled. The image is rendering for some authors on SERP page and not for others. Difference seems to be having an updated G+ page and not having a constantly updating G+ page. any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | irvingw0 -
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 -
What should I set my domain setting to?
In Google Wemnaster tools, I have the option to set it to either have as default the "www" or without it. What are the pros and cons of one way or the other . . . or is this a way more complicated question/can of worms I have opened?
Technical SEO | | damon12120