Increasing Your Site Crawl Rate

If your website is visited by the crawlers on a regular and frequent basis, it’s the first sign that your website appeals to search engines. The most effective way to have frequent crawls is to create a website that search engines consider valuable and important. This is quite obvious, the more important your web site is, the more often search engines will crawl your web site. A big content-rich portal needs crawling more often because such portal is daily publishing new content, whereas a low-grade outdated web site would be a waste of time if, for example, Google frequently crawled it.

Let’s just keep in mind that it’s beyond our powers to force crawlers visit you more often, what we can do, however, is to invite them to come. 

Taking the following measures can help increase the crawl rate of your website:

1. Update your page content often (and notify Google once you do). Take the trouble of publishing new unique content as often as you can and do it regularly (If you can’t afford to update your site every day, 3 times a week can be the optimal update rate for you).
2. Ensure that your server works correctly: monitor the uptime and Google Webmaster tools reports of unreached pages.
3. Watch your page load time. Since the crawlers work on a budget, there will be no time left to index your other pages, if they spend too much time crawling your huge PDFs or images.
4. Double check the site internal link structure: ensure that there is no duplicate content linked via different URLs. The more time the search bot spends reading your duplicate content, the fewer unique pages it will manage to visit.
5. Get more inbound links from regularly crawled websites.
6. Use Google Webmaster tools to adjust the crawl speed.
7. Build a sitemap.
8. It is essential that your server return the correct header response. Don’t make the crawler figure out what has happened: explain it clearly.
9. Another great way to invite crawlers is to assign unique title and meta tags for each of your pages.
10. Monitor crawl rate of your site and see what works and what doesn’t.