Google considers to reduce webpage crawl rate

Google considers the reduction of the crawl rate to conserve resources. Google is growing conscious of the sustainability of crawling. It also pays attention to the reduction of indexing.

This issue is in concern by Google’s Search Relations team.

The team includes John Mueller, Martin Splitt, and Gary Illyes. A recent episode of the podcast discusses their expectations from Google in 2022.

Crawling and indexing are major topics to focus on. SEO professionals and website owners state how they have looked less after these issues.

This is going to be the focus of Google this year. It aims to conserve computing resources. Also, they wish to achieve this by making crawling more sustainable. Crawling and indexing happen digitally. It has no effect on the environment.

Illyes pays attention to this issue and talks about sustainability in general, “… what I mean is that computing, in general, is not really sustainable. And if you think of Bitcoin, for example, Bitcoin mining has a real impact on the environment that you can actually measure, especially if the electricity is coming from coal plants or other less sustainable plants.

Illyes also explains about making web crawling sustainable. He talks about cutting down on refresh crawls. The two types of Googlebot crawling include; crawling to find content and crawling to refresh existing content.

Google plans to scale back on crawling to refresh content. Websites like Wall Street Journal update their new page. It also requires a lot of refreshed crawls for it.

It will attempt to reduce the crawl rate mean for the website. A high crawl rate doesn’t bring a positive SEO signal. Mueller calls it a big misconception. Also, the ranking has nothing to do with crawling. The team is actively considering the idea of reducing the refresh crawls.

If in the future the pages get more refresh crawls, it will not reduce the ranking. The acceptance of the idea is still in the initiation stage.