How Does Google Crawl Pages & Index Them?
A WebmasterWorld thread asks "How does Google determine which pages to crawl?" Google didn't always crawl and index pages as they do now. With the Big Daddy update Google adapted their crawl priorities, which was around April 2006.
Google now bases the crawl priorities based on several factors, one of those factors includes PageRank. As far as I understand it, pages with higher PageRank will be crawled and indexed quicker than pages with lower PageRank, as a general rule.
That is one of the reasons people recommend placing links to your most important pages on your highest PageRank pages (i.e. homepage). One it will increase the PageRank of those pages and it will also give the bot easier access (higher level access) to the page.
Back in the older days, it was easier to get Google to index and rank all your pages on your huge dynamic site, if the pages were search engine friendly. Now even indexing requires page popularity and trust factors. Don't even get the SEO community started about being indexed but being in the supplemental index. :)
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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rustybrick in Google Optimization at December 28, 2006 7:43 AM
Comments (3)
Comments
Toolbar PR is a poor guide to frequency of crawling with Google. The actual number of links, regardless of whether they pass value, seems to have a greater impact on crawl rates than anything related to Toolbar PR.
For example, Matt Cutts has said at least a couple of times that sites with low crawling activity appear to "be on the fringe".
I've got pages in my network that have relatively few links pointing to them and they are crawled about once a month. I have other pages with many links pointing to them and they are crawled every 1-2 days. There is no correlation between Toolbar PR and crawling activity.
Posted by Michael Martinez at December 28, 2006 14:32