How Often Does Google Crawl A Site

How Often Does Google Crawl A Site

To achieve the Search Engine Optimisation goal of any website it is important to know all about “how often does Google Crawl a Site” and what are the factors that affect the crawling process.

Google Crawlers or Google bots is the crucial feature of search engines that affect SEO performance. With a better understanding of the frequency of crawling and procedure, you can optimise the website better and improve it for better visibility on SERPs.

In this blog, we will delve into the factors that influence the number of Google crawlers visiting a site and how to boost the number.

But first, let’s have a look at what is Google bot, crawler and how it works.

 

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What Is Googlebot?

It is an important crawling component of the most popular search engine Google. The search engine uses it to discover, index, and analyse web pages. It is an important software program that continuously browses to follow the links from one page to another and collect the essential information.

The Google bot plays a vital role in creating and updating the Google Search index, which enables Google to produce the most relevant search results when a search query is conducted by the user.

What Is Crawling?

Crawling is a process to navigate through the websites and discover new pages and fresh / updated content. The crawling is done with the help of Google. Google bot plays the role of virtual explorer of the web users. Here is how crawling works:

  • The bot starts crawling with a list of URLs from old crawls and the sitemaps that are provided by the web owners. The bot crawls for new data, updated information, and additional links.
  • Afterwards, it searches for new pages through additional links
  • Meanwhile, the bot keeps an eye on any changes in the existing pages

How Often Does Google Crawl A Site?

The Google bot crawls the website from a couple of days to a few weeks. The answer may vary depending on various factors.

Here are a few reasons that affect the number of crawling on different websites.

  1. Websites that are already well-established and attract lots of websites, such as news websites that consistently produce informative and fresh content, are often crawled by Google. The pages are indexed within minutes for the relevance and high value of the content.
  2. Newer websites on the other hand might have to wait longer for Googlebot crawlers to crawl. The websites do not have the same level of visibility or the content is not updated regularly, hence it results in less frequent crawls. Sometimes these websites have to wait for weeks or months before being crawled by search engines.
  3. Sometimes the site-specific features also leave an effect on the Googlebot crawling. The site’s popularity, credibility, and overall structure are some of the factors that influence crawl frequency. Well-optimised website with consistent content upload, user-friendly structure, and proper indexing tends to be crawled rapidly by Google bots.

 

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How To Influence The Frequency Of Google Crawling?

The way Googlebot crawls the site seems like a one-way mechanism. However, it is a two-lane traffic flow. There is no doubt that Google decides how and when to crawl a site, but your website also plays a significant role in it. Here is how you can influence the frequency of Google crawling:

Site Speed Optimisation:

The Google Crawlers pay the most attention to user-friendly features including site speed. The quicker the website loads, the faster Googlebot crawls it and indexes it accordingly.

For instance, if your site takes several seconds to load, the crawler will spend more time reading one page. Therefore, it will crawl fewer pages in maximum time.

A slow website leaves a negative impact on user experience so does it on the web crawler and affects the ranking. So, it is important to keep your site speed fast. Many online tools help in checking the web speed such as Google PageSpeed Insights.

Create a Sitemap:

A sitemap is the most important way to make GOoglebots crawl your website pages. It is a feature that outlines and describes the context of the content of your page, and the bots can understand the web layout more quickly. With the help of a sitemap, the bot learns about page layout, the whereabouts of related pages, and how they are linked together.

Create and submit a sitemap to Google through Google Search Console so the search engine can quickly and effortlessly locate the updated content.

Optimise Site Structure:

Optimisation site structure or paying attention to technical SEO is important to boost the crawling process. A well-structured website, with good speed, sound interlinking, and organised content boosts easy indexing and affects crawl efficiency. Try to organize the website hierarchically and properly categorise the pages. Internal and external linking is one of the important factors that influence search engine crawling.

Update Content Regularly:

Website ranking is all about content. Try to update consistently with fresh content. Make sure the content is high-quality, optimised, and loaded on time. A newly added content signals to search engine bots that the site is updated and there is something new to be indexed. The bot thus visits crawls the content, and ranks it accordingly.

Set a timetable to upload fresh content. For instance, make a schedule of uploading content thrice a week. It indicates your users and Google bot that the website is organised and it will crawl the content in the same sequence. It is important to note here that if the content is not optimised or not uploaded regularly, the crawler might take time to crawl or penalize it for bad content.

Conclusion:

So that’s all about how often Google crawls a site and how to influence its frequency. With highly optimised content, paying attention to page speed, and submitting sitemap on the Google Search Console, the website owner can influence the frequency of Google bot crawling and enhance the chances of visibility.

 

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