By Shad Super in Questions —

What Actions Should Be Taken if the Crawl Stats Report Shows a Sudden Drop in Pages Crawled Per Day?

Summary

If the Crawl Stats report shows a sudden drop in pages crawled per day, there are several actions to take, including checking for server issues, reviewing site changes, examining robots.txt and meta tags, ensuring site speed, and utilizing resources from authoritative sources like Google Search Central and Moz.

Check for Server Issues

Your server might have experienced downtime or is being slow to respond. Use monitoring tools such as Pingdom or UptimeRobot to check server uptime and response times. Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats provides detailed insights into how Googlebot interacts with your site, and drops in crawling can indicate server-level issues.

Review Recent Site Changes

Assess any recent changes to your site’s structure, content, or URLs. Significant alterations such as URL restructuring, heavy JavaScript loading, or CMS updates might temporarily confuse or slow down crawlers.

For example, if you’ve made widespread changes to URL structures using 301 redirects, it might take some time for crawlers to adjust. You can use Google Search Console to monitor indexing issues due to these changes.

Examine Robots.txt and Meta Tags

Robots.txt Configuration

Review your robots.txt file to ensure you haven’t inadvertently blocked important URLs. Blocking essential resources or entire sections can lead to reduced crawling. You can use Google’s Robots.txt Tester to verify the contents of your robots.txt file for errors.

Meta Tags

Check for the presence of robots meta tags in your HTML, such as <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">, which can inadvertently prevent crawling if applied incorrectly.

Ensure Website Speed and Performance

Slow page speed can discourage search engines from crawling your site. Utilize tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to analyze and improve website performance. Faster loading times can encourage increased crawling.

Enable Caching

Implement server-side caching to reduce load times, making your pages quicker for Googlebot to crawl. Caching pages allows repeat visitors (including crawlers) to access your site more efficiently.

Optimize Images and Minify Resources

Compress images and minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML to make your web pages load faster. Reduce the size of these files without sacrificing quality to enhance overall performance.

Reassess XML Sitemaps

Your XML sitemap helps search engines index your pages more efficiently. Ensure your sitemap is correctly formatted and submitted. Use Google's Sitemap Guidelines to verify the integrity of your sitemap.

Seek External References

For additional support, you might find the following resources helpful:

References