Improving Crawl Efficieny
-
Hi
I'm reading about crawl efficiency & have looked in WMT at the current crawl rate - letting Google optimise this as recommended.
What it's set to is 0.5 requests every 2 seconds, which is 15 URLs every minute.
To me this doesn't sound very good, especially for a site with over 20,000 pages at least?
I'm reading about improving this but if anyone has advice that would be great
-
Great thank you for this! I'll take them on board
Becky
-
You may be overthinking this, Becky. Once the bot has crawled a page, there's no reason (or benefit to you) for it to crawl the page again unless its content has changed. The usual way for it to detect this is through your xml sitemap,. If it's properly coded, it will have a <lastmod>date for Googlebot to reference.
Googlebot does continue to recrawl pages it already knows about "just in case", but your biggest focus should be on ensuring that your most recently added content is crawled quickly upon publishing. This is where making sure your sitemap is updating quickly and accurately, making sure it is pinging search engines on update, and making sure you have links from solid existing pages to the new content will help. If you have blog content many folks don't know that you can submit the blog's RSS feed as an additional sitemap! That's one of the quickest ways to get it noticed.
The other thing you can do to assist the crawling effectiveness is to make certain you're not forcing the crawler to waste its time crawling superfluous, duplicate, thin, or otherwise useless URLs.</lastmod>
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
There are actually several aspects to your question.
1. Google will make its own decision as to how important pages and therefore how often it should be crawled
2. Site speed is a ranking factor
3. Most SEO's belief that Google has a maximum timeframe in which to crawl each page/site. However, I have seen some chronically slow sites which have still crawl and indexed.
I forgot to mention about using an xml site map can help search engines find pages.
Again, be very careful not to confuse crawling and indexing. Crawling is only updating the index, once indexed if it doesn't rank you have another SEO problem, not a technical crawling problem.
Any think a user can access a crawler should be able to find it no problem, however if you have hidden pages the crawler may not find them.
-
Hi
Yes working on that
I just read something which said - A “scheduler” directs Googlebot to crawl the URLs in the priority order, under the constraints of the crawl budget. URLs are being added to the list and prioritized.
So, if you have pages which havent been crawled/indexed as they're seen as a low priority for crawling - how can I improve or change this if need be?
Can I even impact it at all? Can I help crawlers be more efficient at finding/crawling pages I want to rank or not?
Does any of this even help SEO?
-
As a general rule pages will be indexed unless there is a technical issue or a penalty involved.
What you need to be more concerned with is the position of those pages within the index. That obviously comes back to the whole SEO game.
You can use the site parameter followed by a search term that is present on the page you want to check to make sure the pages indexed, like: site:domain.com "page name"
-
Ok thank you, so there must be ways to improve on the number of pages Google indexes?
-
You can obviously do a fetch and submit through search console, but that is designed for one-off changes. Even if you submit pages and make all sorts of signals Google will still make up its own mind what it's going to do and when.
If your content isn't changing much it is probably a disadvantage to have the Google crawler coming back too often as it will slow the site down. If a page is changing regularly the Google bot will normally gobble it pretty quick.
If it was me I would let you let it make its own decision, unless it is causing your problem.
Also keep in mind that crawl and index are two separate kettles of fish, Google crawler will crawl every site and every page that it can find, but doesn't necessarily index.
-
Hi - yes it's the default.
I know we can't figure out exactly what Google is doing, but we can improve crawl efficiency.
If those pages aren't being crawled for weeks, isnt there a way to improve this? How have you found out they haven't been crawled for weeks?
-
P.S. I think the crawl rate setting you are referring to is the Google default if you move the radio button to manual
-
Google is very clever working out how often it needs to crawl your site, pages that get updated more often will get crawled more often. There is no way of influencing exactly what the Google bot does, mostly it will make its own decisions.
If you are talking about other web crawlers, you may need to put guidelines in place in terms of robots.txt or settings on the specific control panel.
20,000 pages to Google isn't a problem! Yes, it may take time. You say it is crawling at '0.5 requests every 2 seconds' - if I've got my calculation right in theory Google will have crawled 20,000 URLs in less than a day!
On my site I have a page which I updated about 2 hours ago, and the change has already replicated to Google, and yet other pages I know for a fact haven't been crawled for weeks.
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
-
I have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
I have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amarieyoussef0 -
Ecommerce category pages & improving rankings
Hi Moz 🙂 I work on an ecommerce site & am getting stuck with how to improve rankings on category pages. I have a competitor who writes loads of content for their category pages under tabs & they perform very well. The content isn't particularly helpful, more about their range and what they offer. I have tested adding similar content under a tab to some of our category pages - with some performing well & others not as well. I know this isn't ideal, and I'd like some help with an alternative. Does anyone have tips on improving rankings on category pages? I don't have much control on the layout, this is controlled by our parent company which restricts us. I am researching writing user guides, but these will be on other pages not directly on the category page & the way we have to add them is a lot of manual work for our webmaster, so I can't get them up as quickly as I'd like. I have seen REI have a small bit of content at the top of their pages that link to guides e.g - https://www.rei.com/c/static-and-rescue-ropes But obviously their domain authority is so high already, that they don't need as much help as me 🙂 At the moment I have some new Chair pages I need to rank, these are competitive and any ideas would be great 🙂 Here are some examples: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/ergonomic-office-chairs http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/executive-office-chairs Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
We 410'ed URLs to decrease URLs submitted and increase crawl rate, but dynamically generated sub URLs from pagination are showing as 404s. Should we 410 these sub URLs?
Hi everyone! We recently 410'ed some URLs to decrease the URLs submitted and hopefully increase our crawl rate. We had some dynamically generated sub-URLs for pagination that are shown as 404s in google. These sub-URLs were canonical to the main URLs and not included in our sitemap. Ex: We assumed that if we 410'ed example.com/url, then the dynamically generated example.com/url/page1 would also 410, but instead it 404’ed. Does it make sense to go through and 410 these dynamically generated sub-URLs or is it not worth it? Thanks in advice for your help! Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffchen0 -
How to improve internal linking for automotive reseller website?
Hi everyone, we set up a website for an automobile reseller. The site is online for about 10 days now and is doing ok. The competition is at a medium level. The URL is http://fahrzeugankauf-wehrle.de/ Now I wonder how I can improve the internal linking a little more. I already read this one https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link but still wonder whether I should link from the sub-pages with the main keywords like "auto kaufen freiburg" oder "autoankauf freiburg" to the mainpage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW
Instead I am linking right now from the mainpage to the subpage "Auto verkaufen". Isn't this a bit contradictory?0 -
After Server Migration - Crawling Gets slow and Dynamic Pages wherein Content changes are not getting Updated
Hello, I have just performed doing server migration 2 days back All's well with traffic moved to new servers But somehow - it seems that w.r.t previous host that on submitting a new article - it was getting indexed in minutes. Now even after submitting page for indexing - its taking bit of time in coming to Search Engines and some pages wherein content is daily updated - despite submitting for indexing - changes are not getting reflected Site name is - http://www.mycarhelpline.com Have checked in robots, meta tags, url structure - all remains well intact. No unknown errors reports through Google webmaster Could someone advise - is it normal - due to name server and ip address change and expect to correct it automatically or am i missing something Kindly advise in . Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Will using my Homepage as a KW target improve my Inner page Ranking?
Hello your help please! I have 2 KWs that i have targeted Inner pages for and they have got them to page 2 in SERPs, but now its getting difficult to move them up to page 1. Will targeting the home page with a higher authority, for the same terms, help or hinder the inner pages current position? Many Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Why is my site not getting crawled by google?
Hi Moz Community, I have an escort directory website that is built out of ajax. We basically followed all the recommendations like implementing the escaped fragment code so Google would be able to see the content. Problem is whenever I submit my sitemap on Google webmastertool it always 700 had been submitted and only 12 static pages had been indexed. I did the site query and only a number of pages where indexed. Does it have anything to do with my site being on HTTPS and not on HTTP? My site is under HTTPS and all my content is ajax based. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | en-gageinc0 -
Correlation Between Domain Authority and Crawl Penetration?
A. Is there a correlation between domain authority and crawl penetration? B. Is there a correlation between domain authority and juice distribution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0