General Considerations Regarding Robots Crawl Rate

Jan 11, 2008 15:29 GMT  ·  By

Search engines have the hard mission to maintain a "fresh" index that reflects the latest changes in the World Wide Web. In search engine optimization of websites the search engines robots crawl rate plays an important role, because it determines the immediately availability of your new content for general audience.

Due to the fact that SEO (search engine optimization) is directly related with the various marketing strategies, the robots crawling rate will directly influence your marketing campaigns at all levels.

Generally speaking, the website crawl rate or indexing rate is influenced by many factors. Based on pre-established criteria the search engine robots will decide the crawling priority for an entire website or parts of it. The main factors that influence the search engine robots crawling rate are: the number of one way links (or backlinks that point out to one or more of your website pages, without the presence of a reciprocal link), the number of internal links, the presence of a sitemap and of course the quality of your website content.

Regarding the Google robots indexing actions, you can specify the crawl rate for a website or parts of it by using Google Webmaster Tools. You are also able to view the Googlebot activity in the last three months as crawl charts that shows number of pages downloaded per day, number of kilobytes downloaded per day and respectively the amount of time spent downloading a page expressed in milliseconds as a function of time expressed in months.

The website crawl rate is related through an indirect proportionality law by the robots crawl cycle, which represents the time measured between two consecutive crawls: the highest crawl rate will correspond to the minimal value of the crawl cycle. The free SEO meter tool allows you to correlate the website crawling actions of Googlebot (based on the crawl cycle values distribution versus time) with the current SEO strategy. Using these reports, you will be able to make your website to be favorite for the Google robots (and theoretically for any search engine robots) by changing or adopting the best SEO strategy.