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Relieve Googlebot of Unnecessary Work

I have already looked into ways to increase crawl rate for those who suspect their site is worth more frequent bot visits. However from time to time I come across forum threads where webmasters complain that (Google) bot seems too active at their pages eating too much bandwitch.

So here I am listing links to those complaints and possible solutions that might help to handle the situation:

  • Verify the Googlebot – make sure that’s really Google that is too interested in your site.
  • Change the Googlebot’s crawl rate via Google Webmaster Tools (while “higher rate” option is available only to few lucky people, “slower rate” can be set by anyone);
  • Make sure the Googlebot is not crawling any extra URLs – i.e. duplicate URLs, URLs containing session IDs or other (multiple) parameters not necessary for indexing:
    • Additive filtering of a set of items;
    • Sorting parameters; etc.
  • Make sure your pages don’t have too many unique URLs that keep the bot too busy: the most popular and widely-known standard is no more than 100 links per page (however that’s not a must of course, Google can cope with more – just keep the number reasonable);
  • Make sure the Googlebot is not busy crawling huge images or PDFs – i.e. mind the size of your files and your page overall load time.
Category SEO
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Ann Smarty Brand amd Community Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas

Ann Smarty is the blogger and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. Ann’s expertise in blogging and tools serve as ...