In our previous article which was SEO :: What are a few best seo strategy for a new startup website which everyone should follow? we discussed some seo strategies which new websites should follow in order to get a better ranking on Google. Today i will like to explain the concept of crawl i.e. what is crawl rate and if we should increase or decrease it.
What is crawl rate?
Crawl rate is the rate at which google indexes your web content. It includes the amount of time spent by google indexing your website, the amount of time to download the page, kilo bytes downloaded and number of pages downloaded. The crawl rate is provided in the google webmaster tools which you can find under Crawl -> Crawl Stats section. The crawl rate is important because it lets you know how often google visits your website and how much time it spends on your website. With the crawl rate you can assess if you need to add more content for better ranking and if your current content is being crawled and indexed properly and in timely manner. The more the time it takes for google to index your content the lower will be your ranking.
In many of my previous articles it was stated again and again that speed of website is an important criteria for getting good ranking on Google. Crawl rate provides you with an insight on whether your website is considered “fast” enough to get good ranking or not. If time spent downloading page in google webmaster tools is high you need to check your server settings or may be change your hosting provider.
When is higher crawl rate beneficial for my website?
You should have a higher crawl rate when you add new content regularly. If your website gets updated regularly the crawl rate should be higher and faster.
When is lower crawl rate beneficial for my website?
You should have a lower crawl rate when your content does not change that often. If your content is static and changes only a few times over a year lower crawl rate will be ok for you.
Should i increase or decrease the crawl rate for better ranking?
No, you should leave it up to google to decide how much and when they want to crawl for content on your website. It is better in that way because Google keeps track of amount of changes and updates on your website and can automatically gather when to crawl again or look for new content. However if you have added a new content and want google to index it right away, login to your google webmaster account and open Crawl -> Fetch as Google option there you can ask google to index new content right away. If you want, you can decrease the crawl rate from google webmaster account however increasing it is not possible, I will write instructions on how to do it in our next article.
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