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
-
Webmaster Crawl errors caused by Joomla menu structure.
Webmaster Tools is reporting crawl errors for pages that do not exist due to how my Joomla menu system works. Example, I have a menu item named "Service Area" that stores 3 sub items but no actual page for Service Area. This results in a URL like domainDOTcom/service-area/service-page.html Because the Service Area menu item is constructed in a way that shows the bot it is a link, I am getting a 404 error saying it can't find domainDOTcom/service-area/ (The link is to "javasript:;") Note, the error doesn't say domainDOTcom/service-area/javascript:; it just says /service-area/ What is the best way to handle this? Can I do something in robots.txt to tell the bot that this /service-area/ should be ignored but any page after /service-area/ is good to go? Should I just mark them as fixed as it's really not a 404 a human will encounter or is it best to somehow explain this to the bot? I was advised on google forums to try this, but I'm nervous about it. Disallow: /service-area/*
Technical SEO | | dwallner
Allow: /service-area/summerlin-pool-service.
Allow: /service-area/north-las-vegas
Allow: /service-area/centennial-hills-pool-service I tried a 301 redirect of /service-area to home page but then it pulls that out of the url and my landing pages become 404's. http://www.lvpoolcleaners.com/ Thanks for any advice! Derrick0 -
My site is not being regularly crawled?
My site used to be crawled regularly, but not anymore. My pages aren't showing up in the index months after they've been up. I've added them to the sitemap and everything. I now have to submit them through webmaster tools to get them to index. And then they don't really rank? Before you go spouting off the standard SEO resolutions... Yes, I checked for crawl errors on Google Webmaster and no, there aren't any issues No, the pages are not noindex. These pages are index,follow No, the pages are not canonical No, the robots.txt does not block any of these pages No, there is nothing funky going on in my .htaccess. The pages load fine No, I don't have any URL parameters set What else would be interfereing? Here is one of the URLs that wasn't crawled for over a month: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-st-louis
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Site verification in WMT
Hello all, I have a site and I want to set a preferred domain but when I do it says I need to verify my site but it gives me no ideas how to do that. I know that normally you have to do it when you set the account up but I had an analytics account for this domain first then just logged on with those details and I was in with no verification process. Cheers
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Internal Ads on A Site
We serve ads on our site using a sub-domain. All ads use a re-direct from ads.domain before redirecting users to the proper, normal, internal url. Most the content on our home page is ad block driven. Is it possible and does it make sense to enter the sub-domain as url parameter in Google Webmaster tools, letting Google know that this is something to be ignored. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Redirecting the .com of our site
Hey guys, A company I consult for has a different site for its users depending on the geography. Example: When a visitor goes to www.company.com if the user is from the EU, it gets redirected to http://eu.company.com If the user is from the US, it goes to http://us.company.com And so on. I have two questions: Does having a redirect on the .com will influence rankings on each specific sub-site? I suspect it will affect the .com since it will simply not get indexed but not sure if affects the sub domains. The content on this sub-sites are not different (I´m still trying to figure out why they are using the sub-domains). Will they get penalized for duplicate content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | FDSConsulting0 -
Will rankings for my micro site rank better if I 301 redirect it to my main site?
This is my first time asking so I will try to be as clear as possible. Ok, I have a micro site that is an (exact match domain) and the domain is a couple 3-4 years old and ranks very well for several search terms. The main two terms it ranks for are like this. houses for rent in XXXXX XXXXX homes for rent (XXXXX equals a city name) The issue is this site has no backlinks, zero advanced SEO, I only did basic optimization to it when i set the site up. Even site structure, url structure all are not good.
Technical SEO | | Robbie8299
The only page I have ever even seen rank is the main root url. But with all that the site does really good in the top 1-2 results for key search terms. Now, I have a main site that is a very big site that has steadily been climbing in search terms every month with great backlinks, optimized for the city and all.
It currently ranks on second page for the listed search terms listed above. What I want to do is 301 redirect this microsite to my city page on my main site that is much better optimized for the key city terms.
The 301 redirect would point this "root domain" (mymicrosite.com) to my city page that looks like this. www.mymaindomain.com/city/XXXXXXX If I do this will Google rank my main URL city page as well as it ranks this microsite with zero links, seo, etc, etc. What happens if it does not? Will I be able to turn off the 301 redirect and keep the microsite rankings? My main reason for wanting this is I want this city page to rank well and I only want to optimize one site instead of both. Any help would be great!0 -
Site revision
our site has complete redesign including site architecture, page url and page content (except domain). It looks like a new site. The old site has been indexed about thirty thousand results by google. now what should i do first?
Technical SEO | | jallenyang0 -
How do I set up a site review for a password protected site?
We need to conduct a SEO analysis for a website that is on a private, password protected development site -- is there anyway for SEOMoz tools to access and analyze a PW protected site? Thank you, Sara Merten
Technical SEO | | kev110