While doing SEO for a website, one question may have arisen in your mind, How does Google recrawl a URL.
Or maybe, How many times Google recrawls a URL or webpage.
Well, Google Search Advocate, John Muller has recently answered this question in a tweet replying to a user’s question.
The user basically indirectly asked him, How many days does it take Google to remove a no-index page from Google Search.
John Muller in turn answered this question by saying, Search engines recrawl URLs at different rates, sometimes multiple times a day whereas sometimes once a month.
This answer helps us to make an assertion of “Google crawls different URLs at Different Rates”.
But the question is: How can we enhance the crawl rate of our website?
To answer this question, we first need to know about the factors influencing the crawl rate.
Factors Influencing Crawl Rate
Below are the list of factors that influence the crawl rate of a webpage by Googlebot:
Popularity
Google prioritizes crawling those webpages first which are popular.
By popular, I mean pages with high backlinks and internal links.
Also, pages whose content is superb and somehow it rank well on the search engine (like at the top most position). In that case as well, those pages are crawled frequently.
Hence, if some of your is highly ranked, then it will also crawl frequently.
Freshness
Google wants to keep its index fresh and that is why it crawls recently updated pages more often.
The fresher your content is, the more its chances to recrawl again.
You can also update an old content by adding helpful information in it to make it better and an updated one.
Server Speed & Stability
A slow or unstable server with frequent downtime discourages Googlebot from crawling extensively.
Think of it that way, suppose your website goes down for 15 minutes and in the same period Googlebot visits your website to index (or reindex) your content.
Now, although the exact timeout duration isn’t publicly known but experts believe, Googlebot doesn’t wait more than 5 seconds for a page to load.
In this period, if the page loads then it will be crawled and considered for indexing or reindexing otherwise left abandoned.
Site Structure and Navigation
A website having a deep hierarchy where reaching a specific page requires navigating through different categories.
Such a website makes it difficult for Googlebot to understand the website’s overall architecture and relationship between pages.
Below are factors making the website’s architecture complex:
Infinite Pagination: Websites with endless pagination (or load more buttons) traps the Googlebot into infinite loops, preventing it from reaching deeper pages.
Orphaned Pages: Pages that are not linked to from any other page on the website are called orphaned pages. If not any url is getting an internal link from any other page, then after a certain time Google Bot will not be able to find that page and ultimately not able to index it on the search engine.
How to Improve the Crawl Rate of your Website?
Below are some ways through which you can improve the crawl rate of your website:
Optimize Website Speed
The more your website speed would be, the more it became easier for Google Bot to crawl your website.
Also, the more pages the bot tries to fetch in a particular period of time (crawl budget), which results in more of your pages getting indexed on Google Search.
So, the better your website speed would be, the better your website’s crawl rate as well.
Simplify Site Structure
The more it is easier to reach from one location of your website to another location inside it, the better your website’s crawl rate and index rate would be.
Hence, it is suggested to keep the crawl depth of your website to fall under 3. Which means any page of your website should be reached from any page within 3 clicks.
High Quality Content
Creating high quality content helps your web pages to rank higher which means more traffic, that ultimately signals Google that the particular webpage is of high quality and helping users.
The crawl rate of high quality content is more in compare to a content that is comparatively of low quality.
Optimized Robots.txt
The robots.txt file helps you to define directives (aka instructions) for bots about which page to crawl on your website and which pages to ignore.
You can optimize your website’s robots.txt file to disallow crawling for unimportant pages of your website.
Read also: Does Changing the IP Address of a website affect its Ranking?
