Would you rate-control Googlebot? How much crawling is too much crawling?
-
One of our sites is very large - over 500M pages. Google has indexed 1/8th of the site - and they tend to crawl between 800k and 1M pages per day.
A few times a year, Google will significantly increase their crawl rate - overnight hitting 2M pages per day or more. This creates big problems for us, because at 1M pages per day Google is consuming 70% of our API capacity, and the API overall is at 90% capacity. At 2M pages per day, 20% of our page requests are 500 errors.
I've lobbied for an investment / overhaul of the API configuration to allow for more Google bandwidth without compromising user experience. My tech team counters that it's a wasted investment - as Google will crawl to our capacity whatever that capacity is.
Questions to Enterprise SEOs:
*Is there any validity to the tech team's claim? I thought Google's crawl rate was based on a combination of PageRank and the frequency of page updates. This indicates there is some upper limit - which we perhaps haven't reached - but which would stabilize once reached.
*We've asked Google to rate-limit our crawl rate in the past. Is that harmful? I've always looked at a robust crawl rate as a good problem to have.
- Is 1.5M Googlebot API calls a day desirable, or something any reasonable Enterprise SEO would seek to throttle back?
*What about setting a longer refresh rate in the sitemaps? Would that reduce the daily crawl demand? We could set increase it to a month, but at 500M pages Google could still have a ball at the 2M pages/day rate.
Thanks
-
I agree with Matt that there can probably be a reduction of pages, but that aside, how much of an issue this is comes down to what pages aren't being indexed. It's hard to advise without the site, are you able to share the domain? If the site has been around for a long time, that seems a low level of indexation. Is this a site where the age of the content matters? For example Craigslist?
Craig
-
Thanks for your response. I get where you're going with that. (Ecomm store gone bad.) It's not actually an Ecomm FWIW. And I do restrict parameters - the list is about a page and a half long. It's a legitimately large site.
You're correct - I don't want Google to crawl the full 500M. But I do want them to crawl 100M. At the current crawl rate we limit them to, it's going to take Google more than 3 months to get to each page a single time. I'd actually like to let them crawl 3M pages a day. Is that an insane amount of Googlebot bandwidth? Does anyone else have a similar situation?
-
Gosh, that's a HUGE site. Are you having Google crawl parameter pages with that? If so, that's a bigger issue.
I can't imagine the crawl issues with 500M pages. A site:amazon.com search only returns 200M. Ebay.com returns 800M so your site is somewhere in between these two? (I understand both probably have a lot more - but not returning as indexed.)
You always WANT a full site crawl - but your techs do have a point. Unless there's an absolutely necessary reason to have 500M indexed pages, I'd also seek to cut that to what you want indexed. That sounds like a nightmare ecommerce store gone bad.
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
-
High Bounce Rate
Hi Mozzers, I wanted to discuss bounce rates as i am trying to drive my websites down and would appreciate some pointers. Firstly, the facts. Ours is an e-commerce website we attract 10000-12000 visitor a month, 8000 of which land on a single page and the other 4000 rest of website. On a whole the rest of the website has a bounce rate of 48-56% which im fairly comfortable about, but have made small gains with little changes. The problem is the single page attracting 8000 visitors. The page is an informative article about the various types of a select product and its most common uses. When i started the page had no internal links and was suffering from a 88% bounce rate. I have since inserted products into every sub-section of the post and lots of links to products, category pages etc. This has gone really well and the pages linked from it attracted 1000 more views month 1, and 1500 month 2 with the bounce rate dropping to 76% (small win). However I am still not happy as this is still very high. I would like to work towards dropping it below 60%. The article attracts traffic from hundreds of longtail keywords around the subject "different types of this product". The average time spent on the page is 4-5 minutes so I know people are reading the article and finding it useful. How else can I look to encourage more click-through?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP0 -
Content Aggregation Site: How much content per aggregated piece is too much?
Let's say I set up a section of my website that aggregated content from major news outlets and bloggers around a certain topic. For each piece of aggregated content, is there a bad, fair, and good range of word count that should be stipulated? I'm asking this because I've been mulling it over—both SEO (duplicate content) issues and copyright issues—to determine what is considered best practice. Any ideas about what is considered best practice in this situation? Also, are there any other issues to consider that I didn't mention?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Difference in Number of URLS in "Crawl, Sitemaps" & "Index Status" in Webmaster Tools, NORMAL?
Greetings MOZ Community: Webmaster Tools under "Index Status" shows 850 URLs indexed for our website (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). The number of URLs indexed jumped by around 175 around June 10th, shortly after we launched a new version of our website. No new URLs were added to the site upgrade. Under Webmaster Tools under "Crawl, Site maps", it shows 637 pages submitted and 599 indexed. Prior to June 6th there was not a significant difference in the number of pages shown between the "Index Status" and "Crawl. Site Maps". Now there is a differential of 175. The 850 URLs in "Index Status" is equal to the number of URLs in the MOZ domain crawl report I ran yesterday. Since this differential developed, ranking has declined sharply. Perhaps I am hit by the new version of Panda, but Google indexing junk pages (if that is in fact happening) could have something to do with it. Is this differential between the number of URLs shown in "Index Status" and "Crawl, Sitemaps" normal? I am attaching Images of the two screens from Webmaster Tools as well as the MOZ crawl to illustrate what has occurred. My developer seems stumped by this. He has submitted a removal request for the 175 URLs to Google, but they remain in the index. Any suggestions? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Stop Google crawling a site at set times
Hi All I know I can use robots.txt to block Google from pages on my site but is there a way to stop Google crawling my site at set times of the day? Or to request that they crawl at other times? Thanks Sean
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ske110 -
Googlebot on paywall made with cookies and local storage
My question is about paywalls made with cookies and local storage. We are changing a website with free content to a open paywall with a 5 article view weekly limit. The paywall is made to work with cookies and local storage. The article views are stored to local storage but you have to have your cookies enabled so that you can read the free articles. If you don't have cookies enable we would pass an error page (otherwise the paywall would be easy to bypass). Can you say how this affects SEO? We would still like that Google would index all article pages that it does now. Would it be cloaking if we treated Googlebot differently so that when it does not have cookies enabled, it would still be able to index the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OPU1 -
Which URL structure is much better?
Hi Everybody, Which URL structure is much better? Type 01. http://www.domain.com/category-a/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprasad
http://www.domain.com/category-a/subcategory-a-1/
http://www.domain.com/category-a/subcategory-a-2/
http://www.domain.com/category-b/
http://www.domain.com/category-b/subcategory-b-1/
http://www.domain.com/category-b/subcategory-b-2/ Type 02. http://www.domain.com/category-a/
http://www.domain.com/subcategory-a-1/
http://www.domain.com/subcategory-a-2/
http://www.domain.com/category-b/
http://www.domain.com/subcategory-b-1/
http://www.domain.com/subcategory-b-2/ How these 2 types can affect for Ranking, Site Links in Google and passing PR from root to other pages? Thanks Prasad0 -
Does Google crawl the pages which are generated via the site's search box queries?
For example, if I search for an 'x' item in a site's search box and if the site displays a list of results based on the query, would that page be crawled? I am asking this question because this would be a URL that is non existent on the site and hence am confused as to whether Google bots would be able to find it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0 -
Googlebot + Meta-Refresh
Quick question, can Googlebot (or other search engines) follow meta refresh tags? Does it work anything like a 301 in terms of passing value to the new page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler1