Should I set a max crawl rate in Webmaster Tools?

[LiamMcArthur]

We have a website with around 5,000 pages and for the past few months we've had our crawl rate set to maximum (we'd just started paying for a top of the range dedicated server at the time, so performance wasn't an issue).

Google Webmaster Tools has alerted me this morning that the crawl rate has expired so I'd have to manually set the rate again. In terms of SEO, is having a max rate a good thing?

I found this post on Moz, but it's dated from 2008. Any thoughts on this?

[LiamMcArthur]

At first I assumed that by manually setting the crawl rate to the maximum, Google would crawl my website faster and more frequently. Our website has tens of thousands of pages so I didn't want Google missing any of it or taking a long time to index new content. We have new products added to the website daily and others that come off or change.

I'll let Google decide

[KristinaKledzik]

Yep, they're a little vague here! But the answer is: Google will crawl your site at whatever rate it wants (it's probably crawling Amazon 24/7), unless you limit how much it can crawl in Google Webmaster Tools. Then, Google will crawl your site at whatever rate it wants, unless than rate is higher than the limit you put in, and then it will limit itself.

If you're anxious for Google to crawl your site more because a) you have something that's changed and you want Google to have it in their index, or b) because you're hoping it'll affect your rankings:

a) If there's specific information that you want Google to update its index with, submit the URL of the page that's new or changed into "Fetch as Googlebot" and then, once you fetch it, hit the "Submit to index" button to the right. I work on a site that's a DA 58 and fetching something as Googlebot updates the index within an hour.

b) How much Google crawls your site has to do with how important your site is; forcing Google to crawl your site more will not make it think your site is more important.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

[LiamMcArthur]

Is selecting "Limit Google's maximum crawl rate" and then manually moving the rate to the highest (0.2 requests per second / 5 seconds between requests) a higher rate than selecting "Let Google optimize for my site (recommended)"? Google don't really expand on this! I want them to crawl at the very maximum but they don't tell us how many requests per second and seconds between requests are involved when selecting the optimized option.

Sxw2zH1

[Eric_Rohrback]

You don't need to. Just let Google crawl at will. The only reason you would want to limit the crawl rate is if you're having performance issues from the server you're on (too much traffic at once). If you're not having any issues, then allow Google to crawl as many pages as they can.