How to Increase Google’s Crawl Frequency

You want to rank many pages on a site, not just the homepage. You're also actively making changes to your sites and want bots to quickly see this. Here's how to ensure search engine bots will frequent your site more often and crawl more pages.

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Date published
November 12, 2012 Categories

crawling-botI was a part of a much anticipated website redesign and relaunch recently. I fervently monitored post launch metrics, page crawl rate, 404s, indexed pages, and so on as any other anxious SEO professional would do.

While reviewing the pages crawled per day in Google Webmaster Tools, I noticed that out of the gate we had an instant crawl of nearly all site pages.

I passed this on to the client for which I got the quick reply of, “Why is it crawling more pages now than it used to crawl?”

Seeing this reminded me yet again of all the reasons why sound SEO practices on-site can help aid in crawl frequency enhancement.

(Note: Ideal page count is around 500 pages, some duplicate pages were quickly indexed and then roboted.)

Through the redesign, we enacted several SEO elements, which have helped to allow and some instance entice crawling bots to frequent the site more often…and more pages at that. Let’s examine how those elements increased Google’s crawl frequency.

Why You Should Care About Crawl Frequency

SEO, to many, hinges upon attaining enhanced visibility for highly searched terms as well as referring this traffic to their sites. Taking our blinders off for a moment, there are a few things we have to remember.

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.

Redesign/Site Migration or Not, No Excuses

As mentioned above the 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, thanks Google Caffeine!

For many out there, you can’t enjoy the opportunity of creating a full scale redesign, platform change, and SEO overhaul of a site all at once. If this is you, then the list below is a working order of all the standard SEO practices you can work on to improve crawl frequency on your site.

Get ’em on the Site

Hand Them the Keys to the Site

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. This doesn’t mean you need new content site-wide every month, but it does mean refreshing existing content on a quarterly basis and maintaining site sections – news, blog, etc. –that have continuously added content onto the domain.

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.

Conclusion

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 SEO. 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.

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