Google Crawl Frequency is the frequency with which Googlebot visits your site can vary from hours to weeks. Through the redesign, we enacted severalSearch Engine Optimization elements, which have helped to allow and some instance entice crawling bots to frequent the site more often and more pages at that.
Why You Should Care About Crawl Frequency
We want to rank many pages on a site, not just the homepage. Additionally, we're actively making changes to our sites and we want bots to see this as quickly as possible and as deep within the site as possible.
Let's examine how those elements increased Google's crawl frequency.
Redesign/Site Migration
Redesign effort did a good job of lending to the opportunity to enhance crawl frequency as so many good SEO changes were taking place at once. Additionally, so much more new content and refreshed content drives the bots nuts giving them so much more to want to peruse on the site. Working order of all the standard Search Engine Optimization practices you can work on to improve crawl frequency on your site.
Get ’em on the Site
- Run a DNS check, Ping and Traceroute check of the site to assess if there are any issues with site pages loading with regard to connectivity or any other server issues.
- Run a page load speed report of your 10 most important pages to review how fast your pages are loading. Crawlers lack patience.
- Utilize parameter-free static/clean URLs on the site. Bots have long had issues with parameter crawling. Yes, they can often see their way through these now, but why not make it easier for them to crawl the site?
Hand Them the Keys to the Site
- Review your robots.txt file as well as your usage of meta robots tags. What pages are holding from them?
- Have an XML sitemap as well as HTML sitemap.
- Enlist supplemental navigation on-site (i.e., footer navigation, breadcrumb navigation, and relevant internal linking in copy). Create pathways to make a site easy to crawl.
- Fix internal links resulting in 404 errors as well as ensuring that external links open in new windows. You don’t want to stop the crawl and you don’t want to usher them away.
Entice & Lure Them
Generate fresh content. This may be the most important point in the checklist. Give them a reason to feel they should come back on a regular basis. Generate links and social citations to your site. This can be a large scale task in itself. Think of it this way: the more links you have out on the web, the greater your chances are of attracting crawling bots. Think of links as portals into your site.
As you can see, there are many components that aid in enhancing your bot crawl frequency and depth of crawl. These are also many of the foundational elements of Search Engine Optimization. This helps to reinforce that crawl frequency, is after all, a very important aspect of SEO itself. Adhere to these recommendations and you will have a better optimized site and hopefully see an enhanced bot crawl rate.
