How often does Google crawl a site? Imagine this: you’ve just published a new blog post and you can’t wait for your audience to read it. So, you share it on social media, and then—silence. No one is talking about it. What’s wrong?
Chances are, there’s nothing wrong with your content. It’s just that Google hasn’t had a chance to crawl it yet. Crawlers are like spiders; they go out, explore the web, and bring information back to Google. The more often you publish new content, the more often Google will crawl your site, and the sooner your audience will start talking about it. If you’re looking to boost website traffic or enhance website visibility, consider leveraging services like those offered by SocialGreg.
What Is Crawling and How Does It Work?
Crawling is the process by which Googlebot—Google’s web crawling bot—visits your website to “index” it. This means that the content of your website is added to Google’s search engine so it can be returned in search results when someone searches for related terms.
Googlebot visits websites at varying intervals, depending on a number of factors including the freshness of the content, how often it is updated, and the amount of traffic it receives. As a general rule, Googlebot will visit a website every few weeks to months.
However, there are a number of ways to ensure that your website is crawled more frequently. You can submit your website to Google through Search Console, and use the “Fetch as Google” tool to request that Googlebot crawl specific pages or sections of your website.
How Often Does Google Crawl a Site?
Do you know how often Google crawls your website? If you don’t, you’re not alone. A lot of website owners don’t have a clue about how frequently their site is crawled.
The short answer is that Google crawl a website “as often as necessary.” However, that doesn’t really tell us much, does it? So let’s break it down a bit.
Googlebot, which is Google’s web crawler, scans a website’s pages and looks for changes. When it finds changes, Googlebot updates its index with the new content. So if you make changes to your website—add new pages, update content, delete pages—Googlebot will crawl your site to update its index.
You can also speed up the crawling process by using the Fetch as Google tool in Search Console. This tool allows you to tell Googlebot to crawl a specific page or URL on your website.
So how often does Google crawl a site? Well, it depends on how often you make changes to your website and how frequently Googlebot finds changes. But as a general rule, Googlebot crawls websites about once a week.
Tools for Tracking Google Crawls
There are a few different tools you can use to track how often Google crawls your site. One of the most popular is Google Search Console, which provides detailed information on how often your site was crawled and when.
Another great tool is called the “Crawl Test Tool” and it’s available on Google Webmaster Tools. This tool allows you to submit a URL and see how Googlebot crawls and indexes it.
By using these tools, you can get an idea of how frequently your site is being crawled by Google. If you’re not happy with the results, you can then make changes to try and improve them.
Factors That Affect How Often Google Crawls a Site
1. Number of Pages
The first factor that affects how often Google crawls a site is the number of pages. The more pages a website has, the more often it will be crawled by Googlebot. This means that if you have an entire website dedicated to your business and have many different products or services listed on it, chances are good that Googlebot will visit more frequently than if only one page were available for sale.
The reason why this is important is because when people go online looking for information about something like products or services they want to buy—and they happen upon yours—they won’t necessarily know what else exists on your site unless they actually read through all its content before deciding where else they can go next in their search results list!
2. The Sitemap
A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your site. It can help Google understand the structure of your site and where new pages should be added. Which makes it easier for both you and Google to find new content.
The more often you update (or crawl) your sitemap, the better off you’ll be in terms of getting indexed by search engines like Google. For example: If someone adds a new page onto their website every day but never updates their sitemap file with this information, then those changes will never appear in search results for people searching on relevant keywords related to that topic area (for example: “how do I write” vs “how do I write songs”). So even though they may have published an article about writing songs yesterday afternoon at 2pm EST—that publication wouldn’t show up when someone searched using those same keywords because their publication hasn’t been crawled yet since it wasn’t included in their list of recently updated pages.
3. Popular Content
Popular content is crawled more frequently.
Google has to crawl popular content more frequently because it gets more links and shares. If a page has a lot of links pointing to it, then Google will automatically look at the page in its indexing process. Which means that this site is getting priority over all others. At least when it comes time for Googlebot crawling your site’s pages.
4. New Sites
New sites are crawled more frequently than old sites. This is because a new site has a higher priority than an old site, and therefore gets crawled sooner.
However, there are also some factors that can affect how often Google crawls a certain page or site:
- The number of links pointing to your site (known as “link juice”). The more links pointing at it, the more likely Google will crawl them too! If you have lots of external links pointing at your website then this may result in increased traffic from Googlebot crawling through your pages more frequently than usual!
5. External Links to a Page
Links from other sites to your site are a factor in how often Google crawls your site. This is because Google uses the links on other sites as an indication of how important or relevant those pages are.
In general, high-authority links are more important than low-authority ones when determining if a page should be crawled or not. You can see this by looking at the number one result for any keyword: if it’s from a high authority website (like Wikipedia). Then it will probably be crawled more often. Than if it were from a newbie blog with no reputation or recognition among users.
6. Old Pages
The fact that a page is old is not always a bad thing. For example, if you’re trying to sell old tangible products and services, it might be good for Google’s crawlers not to visit your site often because they won’t bother with stale content. However, if you have new content on those pages (for example, blog posts about new products), then it may make sense for Google to get rid of some of the older stuff in order for them to find more valuable information on your website.
If there are lots of outdated pages on your website—and especially if those pages link directly back into other parts of the site—then this could also affect how often these pages will be crawled by Google bots.
7. Internal Links to a Page
Internal links are a great way to improve your site’s SEO. They help Google crawl and index your pages, which means more people can find you.
Internal links have the potential to increase traffic by as much as 8x! But they also have another benefit: they improve user experience (UX) by providing users with helpful information when they click on the link.
8. If a Page Has Changed Recently
If a page has changed recently, Google may need to re-crawl it. This can take some time, depending on the type of change that was made. For example, if you add or remove an image from your website and this is done without updating your page content (for example, by replacing an old photo with a new one), then there isn’t much impact on how often Google crawls your site—but if you add or remove text from a post on social media pages like Facebook or Twitter and republish those posts with updated information (for example by adding new paragraphs), then this will affect how often Google crawls them for search results.
9. How Long It Takes a Page to Load
Google uses page load time as a ranking signal. If your page takes too long to load, it can hurt your rankings and decrease engagement on the site.
Google recommends using PageSpeed Insights to improve page load times: https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/01/improve-your-web-pages-performance-by-using.html
If you want to see how well your site loads on mobile devices, try this tool: https://speedtestapp.com/
10. Crawl Demand from Other Sites
Crawl demand from other sites is a major factor in how often Google crawls a site. When you see that your site has been crawled by Google, it means that other sites have linked to your content and are now being indexed by Google.
You can see the number of pages on your own website that have been crawled by Google:
- [Google Search Console](https://www.google.com/webmasters/) -> View Crawl Stats -> View Source Code
Tips to Help Keep Your Website Fresh
To ensure your website is crawled by Google regularly, there are some simple tips you can keep in mind. First, post new content regularly to keep your website fresh and relevant. This way, when Google crawls your website it will more likely find something new and noteworthy.
Second, use keywords in your content that are related to your website’s niche. This will help attract more traffic from potential customers and make it easier for the crawlers to find the content they’re looking for.
Third, optimize your pages with meta descriptions and titles which contain relevant keywords that explain the content on the page. Doing this will make it easier for Google to index your page so it can be found more quickly by web users searching for specific topics.
And finally, create internal links throughout each page of your website as this allows search engine crawlers to find related pages quickly and easily without having to leave a page once they’ve reached it.
What to Do if Your Website Isn’t Being Crawled by Google
If your website isn’t being crawled by Google, here are some things you can do to troubleshoot and fix the issue.
First, make sure that your website is indexed. You can find out if it’s indexed by searching for the domain name in Google, or using the “site:” operator when searching. If your website isn’t showing up in the results, then you’ll know that it’s not indexed and therefore not being crawled by Google.
Second, make sure that your robots.txt file is set up correctly. This is a file that instructs search engine spiders on which pages of your site to index and which ones to ignore. If your robots file isn’t correct, Google may be missing important pages on your website.
Third, check if there are any crawl errors or issues reported in Search Console. If there are any crawl errors listed, then these need to be fixed as soon as possible before Google can start crawling and indexing your site again.
Finally, make sure that all of the internal links on your site are working properly so that search engine bots can find all of the pages they need to crawl and index.
How To Crawl a List Of URLS?
While it’s easy to make a list of URLs in an address bar, it can be slow to open each link individually. This is a basic tutorial on how to crawl a list of URLs with Launchy in Windows. First, open Launchy by holding down the Windows key and pressing the letter L. Then, in the box that appears, type the words that you’d like to search for. After that, click the checkmark icon in the lower-right corner of the box. Finally, go to the first link in the list and click the arrow key once.
How Long Does It Take to Index a Site?
It depends on a number of variables, including the size and complexity of the site, the number of pages, content and any blocking issues, such as redirects. If you’re seeing a decrease in site speed, it’s a good idea to run a full site crawl, which could reveal any redirect chains, performance issues or errors. Once you’re aware of the problems, you can fix them and get your site back to how it was.
How To Know If Google Crawled My Site
If you want to know whether or not Google has crawled your site, use the Fetch as Google tool in Webmaster Tools. Simply enter your website’s URL and you can see what Google sees. This is an effective way to check if Google has found all of your site’s pages.
It’s also a good idea to use Google Analytics to track pageviews and referrers. If you notice a sudden increase in pageviews from a certain search engine, make sure to check your Fetch as Google results.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to keep your website ranking high, it’s important to keep these things in mind. Remember, though, that these crawl rates are just averages, and your site’s crawl rate may vary depending on a variety of factors. If you’re noticing that your site isn’t being crawled as often as you’d like, or as often as you think it should be, reach out to Google for more help.