Why might my websites crawl rate....explode?

[Silkstream]

Hi Mozzers,

I have a website with approx 110,000 pages. According to search console, Google will usually crawl, on average, anywhere between 500 - 1500 pages per day. However, lately the crawl rate seems to have increased rather drastically:

9/5/16 - 923
9/6/16 - 946
9/7/16 - 848
9/8/16 - 11072
9/9/16 - 50923
9/10/16 - 60389
9/11/16 - 17170
9/12/16 - 79809

I was wondering if anyone could offer any insight into why may be happening and if I should be concerned?
Thanks in advance for all advice.

[Silkstream]

Thank you Thomas.

[ThomasHarvey]

Just to add to this, there is nothing inherently wrong with Google crawling more pages of your site. The only time I would modify the crawl rate is when the extra crawling is actually slowing your server down.

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi There,

The crawl rate control was devised by Google to give control to the users, so that they can limit the server load that is created by constant crawling of the website.

So, it's up to you to decide whether you want to lower/limit it.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/48620?hl=en

Thanks,

Vijay

[Silkstream]

Thank you Vijay, your response is very helpful. Do you know if there are any guidelines for optimal crawl rates? I tend to look at average pages crawled per day and multiply by 90. If that number is equal to or more than the amount of pages on-site, then we'd be good, right? Or is there a flaw in that logic?

[Silkstream]

Hi Thomas,

Thank you for responding. Yes, kind of. There are 40 main categories and each of those has upto 100 links to sub categories, and then the same again for sub-sub categories.

I've spent the last year cleaning it up and removing pages that didnt need to be there. Quite a lot of pages! In order to help Google find and index the important ones.

I will run it through Screaming Frog now, just to be sure!

[Vijay-Gaur]

hi There,

The following can be reasons for your crawl rate increase

• You have updated the content of the website recently or doing it regularly.
• You  / someone from your end submitted the sitemap.xml to google again or doing it over and over.
• Your robots.txt was changed to give access to earlier blocked pages.
• Your or someone used ping services to let search engines know about your website.  There are many manual ping services like Pingomatic and in the WordPress you can manually add more ping services to ping many search engine bots. You can find such a list at WordPress ping list post (http://www.shoutmeloud.com/wordpress-ping-list.html).
• You can also monitor and optimize Google Crawl rate using Google Webmaster Tools. Just go to the crawl stats there and analyze. You can manually set your Google crawl rate and increase it to faster or slower. Though I would suggest use it with caution and use it only when you are actually facing issues with bots not crawling your site effectively. You can read more about changing Google crawl rate here https://support.google.com/webmasters/?hl=en&answer=48620#topic=3309469 .

I hope this helps, if you have further queries , feel free to respond.

Regards,

Vijay

[ThomasHarvey]

I wouldn't be concerned at all, have you got one section that expands into a load of other links? It could be that Google hasn't crawled properly for a while and then finds a section they haven't seen before and just goes mad.

Alternatively, have you crawled with screamingfrog or similar tool? Incase there's an issue you weren't aware of.