Googlebot Crawl Rate causing site slowdown
-
I am hearing from my IT department that Googlebot is causing as massive slowdown/crash our site. We get 3.5 to 4 million pageviews a month and add 70-100 new articles on the website each day. We provide daily stock research and marke analysis, so its all high quality relevant content. Here are the crawl stats from WMT:
I have not worked with a lot of high volume high traffic sites before, but these crawl stats do not seem to be out of line. My team is getting pressure from the sysadmins to slow down the crawl rate, or block some or all of the site from GoogleBot.
Do these crawl stats seem in line with sites? Would slowing down crawl rates have a big effect on rankings?
Thanks
-
Similar to Michael, my IT team is saying Googlebot is causing performance issues - specifically during peak hours.
It was suggested that we consider using apache re-write rules to serve Googlebot a 503 during our peak hours to limit the impact. I found the stackoverflow thread (link below) in which John Muller seems to suggest this approach, but has anyone tried this?
-
Blocking googlebot is a quick and easy way to disappear from the Index. Not an option if you want Google to rank your site.
For smaller sites or ones with limited technologies, I sometimes recommend using a crawl-delay directive in robots.txt
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48620
But I agree with both Shane and Zachary, this doesn't seem like the long term answer to your problems. Your crawl stats don't seem out of line for a site of your size, and perhaps a better hardware configuration could help things out.
With 70 new articles each day, I'd want Google crawling my site as much as they pleased.
-
whatever Google's default is in GWT - It sets it for you.
You can change it, but it is not reccomended unless for a specific reason (such as Michael Lewis's specific scenario) even though, I am not completely sold that Gbot is what is causing the "dealbreaking" overhead.
-
what is the ideal setting on the crawler. i have been wondering about this for some time.
-
Hi,
Your admins saying that, is like someone saying "we need to shut the site down, we are getting to much traffic!" Common sys-admin response (fix it somewhere else)
4GB a day downloaded, is alot of Bot traffic, but it appears you are a "real time" site, that is probably actually helped and maybe even reliant on your high crawl rate....
I would upgrade hardware - or even look into some kind of off site cloud redundancy for failover (Hybrid)
I highly doubt that 4GB a day, is a "dealbreaker",but of course that is just based off the one image, and your admins probably have resource monitors - Maybe Varnish is an answer for static content to help lighten load???? Or CDN for file hosting to lighten bandwidth load?
Shane
-
We are hosting the site on our own hardware at a big colo. I know that we are upgrading servers but they will not be online until the end of July.
Thanks!
-
I wouldn't slow the crawl rate. A high crawl rate is good so that Google can keep their index of your website current.
The better solution is to reconsider your hardware and networking setup. Do you know how you are being hosted? From my own experience with a website of that size, a load balancer on two decent dedicated servers should handle the load without problems. Google crawling your pages shouldn't create noticeable overhead on the right setup.
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
-
Schema, aggregate ratings and trustpilot
Hi! I'm looking to include rich snippets on some of my product sites, such as price etc. In addition, it would be nice to include our overall ratings (from Trustpilot) on the different pages.
Technical SEO | | eyephone
However, I've been looking all over, and haven't really found a clear answer, as to if this is even in adherence with the Google guidelines. As it is our company overall, and not the specific products that are being rated, I have done it likes this (on product pages): name of organization
248
8,2
10. other product-specific information Would this be against guidelines?0 -
Site-wide Links
Hey y'all, I know this question has been asked many times before but I wanted to see what your stance was on this particular case. The organisation I work for is a group of 12 companies - each with its own website. On some of the sites we have a link to the other sites within the group on every single page of that site. Our organic search traffic has dropped a bit but not significantly and we haven't received any manual penalties from Google. It's also worth mentioning that the referral traffic for these sites from the other sites I control is quite good and the bounce rate is extremely low. If you were in my shoes would you remove the links, put a nofollow tag on the links or leave the links as they are? Thanks guys 🙂
Technical SEO | | AAttias0 -
2 sets of stats for same site
Somehow on OSE I managed to get two different sets of results appear for my page. The column on the left (PA 34) is for mysite.com/ and the second column is for www.mysite.com/ .Note that these are the same site. Why do i have two different sets of results ?(note some things are the same such as google +1 & FB likes)Im concerned ive done something wrong and could have a bigger beast with both sets of results merged together. Any help much appreciated. Chris QFNeGh7
Technical SEO | | cjkimber0 -
Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | | melen0 -
Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ifbyphone0 -
Webmaster tools crawl stats
Hi I have a clients site that was having aprox 30 - 50 pages crawled regularly since site launch up until end of Jan. On the 21st Jan the crawled pages dropped significantly from this average to about 11 - 20 pages per day. This also coincided with a massive rankings drop on the 22nd which i thought was something to do with panda although it later turned out the hosts had changed the DNS and exactly a week after fixing it the rankings returned so i think that was the cause not panda. However i note that the crawl rate still hasn't returned to what it was/previous average and is still following the new average of 10-20 pages per day rather than the 30-50 pages per day. Does anyone have any ideas why this is ? I have since added a site map but hasnt increased crawl rate since A bit of further info if it helps in any way is that In the indexed status section says 48 pages ever crawled with 37 pages indexed. There are 48 pages on the site. The site map section says 37 submitted with 35 indexed. I would have thought that since dynamic site map would submit all urls Any clarity re the above much appreciated ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Could a large number of No Followed links in to my site have caused a penalty?
On 22nd Feb, I placed a text ad on a respected industry recruitment website. As the site has many pages, the webmaster made a point of NOFOLLOWING the links back to my site. 6 days later, my site lost 30% of its daily traffic overnight, and it's stayed there ever since. I looked on Webmaster Tools just now, and it says that there are 125,000 links coming in to my site from the site I'm advertising on (even though the links are NOFOLLOWED). Could this have triggered the fall in search traffic to my site? Thanks for any feedback.
Technical SEO | | tofftrader0 -
Crawl Errors In Webmaster Tools
Hi Guys, Searched the web in an answer to the importance of crawl errors in Webmaster tools but keep coming up with different answers. I have been working on a clients site for the last two months and (just completed one months of link bulding), however seems I have inherited issues I wasn't aware of from the previous guy that did the site. The site is currently at page 6 for the keyphrase 'boiler spares' with a keyword rich domain and a good onpage plan. Over the last couple of weeks he has been as high as page 4, only to be pushed back to page 8 and now settled at page 6. The only issue I can seem to find with the site in webmaster tools is crawl errors here are the stats:- In sitemaps : 123 Not Found : 2,079 Restricted by robots.txt 1 Unreachable: 2 I have read that ecommerce sites can often give off false negatives in terms of crawl errors from Google, however, these not found crawl errors are being linked from pages within the site. How have others solved the issue of crawl errors on ecommerce sites? could this be the reason for the bouncing round in the rankings or is it just a competitive niche and I need to be patient? Kind Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | optimiz10