Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should we use Google's crawl delay setting?
-
We’ve been noticing a huge uptick in Google’s spidering lately, and along with it a notable worsening of render times.
Yesterday, for example, Google spidered our site at a rate of 30:1 (google spider vs. organic traffic.) So in other words, for every organic page request, Google hits the site 30 times.
Our render times have lengthened to an avg. of 2 seconds (and up to 2.5 seconds). Before this renewed interest Google has taken in us we were seeing closer to one second average render times, and often half of that.
A year ago, the ratio of Spider to Organic was between 6:1 and 10:1.
Is requesting a crawl-delay from Googlebot a viable option?
Our goal would be only to reduce Googlebot traffic, and hopefully improve render times and organic traffic.
Thanks,
Trisha
-
Unfortunately you can't change crawl settings for Google in a robots.txt file, they just ignore it. The best way to rate limit them is using custom Crawl settings in Google Webmaster Tools. (look under Site configuration > Settings)
You also might want to consider using your loadbalancer to direct Google (and other search engines) to a "condomised" group of servers (app, db, cache, search) thereby ensuring your users arent inadvertantly hit by perfomance issues caused by over zealous bot crawling.
-
We're a publisher, which means that as an industry our normal render times are always at the top of the chart. Ads are notoriously slow to load, and that's how we earn our keep. These results are bad, though, even for publishing.
We're serving millions of uniques a month, on a bank of dedicated servers hosted off site, load balanced, etc.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google has deindexed a page it thinks is set to 'noindex', but is in fact still set to 'index'
A page on our WordPress powered website has had an error message thrown up in GSC to say it is included in the sitemap but set to 'noindex'. The page has also been removed from Google's search results. Page is https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/bad-credit-mortgages/how-to-get-a-mortgage-with-bad-credit/ Looking at the page code, plus using Screaming Frog and Ahrefs crawlers, the page is very clearly still set to 'index'. The SEO plugin we use has not been changed to 'noindex' the page. I have asked for it to be reindexed via GSC but I'm concerned why Google thinks this page was asked to be noindexed. Can anyone help with this one? Has anyone seen this before, been hit with this recently, got any advice...?
Technical SEO | | d.bird0 -
Why can't google mobile friendly test access my website?
getting the following error when trying to use google mobile friendly tool: "page cannot be reached. This could be because the page is unavailable or blocked by robots.txt" I don't have anything blocked by robots.txt or robots tag. i also manage to render my pages on google search console's fetch and render....so what can be the reason that the tool can't access my website? Also...the mobile usability report on the search console works but reports very little, and the google speed test also doesnt work... Any ideas to what is the reason and how to fix this? LEARN MOREDetailsUser agentGooglebot smartphone
Technical SEO | | Nadav_W0 -
How to track my actual traffic source using Google Analytics which are now showing as referral traffic?
Hi Mozzers, I went through many Q&As in the community this morning. I found a solution where I could just remove the referral site in analytics>admin>property>tracking info>referral exclusion list. So I removed paypal.com which was the main referral traffic. I thought the problem is solved. Later today I got another order, now the referral traffic is from eway.com, now what? Yes I know I will add this to the exclusion list but there will be many more referral sites. My main concern is I am not able to track the actual traffic source. How do I do that? 1. Do I need to use google url tracking for all my pages?
Technical SEO | | DebashishB
2. Do I need to add tracking code in each page of the site?
3. Is there a way to track the actual source of this traffic, now that the transaction is already made but reflects as referral traffic in Google Analytics? jZjTN0 -
What punctuation can you use in meta tags? Are there any Google does not like?
So I know you can use dashes and | in meta tags, but can anyone tell me what other punctuation you can use? Also, it'd be great to know what punctuation you can't use. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Trevorneo1 -
Blocked URL parameters can still be crawled and indexed by google?
Hy guys, I have two questions and one might be a dumb question but there it goes. I just want to be sure that I understand: IF I tell webmaster tools to ignore an URL Parameter, will google still index and rank my url? IS it ok if I don't append in the url structure the brand filter?, will I still rank for that brand? Thanks, PS: ok 3 questions :)...
Technical SEO | | catalinmoraru0 -
Is there a way for me to automatically download a website's sitemap.xml every month?
From now on we want to store all our sitemap.xml over the next years. Its a nice archive to have that allows us to analyse how many pages we have on our website and which ones were removed/redirected. Any suggestions? Thanks
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency0 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
What's the SEO impact of url suffixes?
Is there an advantage/disadvantage to adding an .html suffix to urls in a CMS like WordPress. Plugins exist to do it, but it seems better for the user to leave it off. What do search engines prefer?
Technical SEO | | Cornucopia0