In February we reported that Google said it is a myth to believe that crawl rate spikes are early signs of an upcoming algorithm update. Gary Illyes from Google told us it was a myth.
So it came up again, this time it was in Google Hangout on Google+ yesterday with John Mueller who said the same thing. But when I prodded a bit, and it isn't so clear.
I asked at the 20:44 mark:
For the Panda score, or any of these scores to be updated, you have to refresh… You have to crawl, figure out what’s changed, so forth. You might do a spike in crawling, if you see ten percent of the site has updated...
John Mueller said:
Yeah, I mean that that can happen but it's not specific to to the Panda update in a case like that. So what could happen is, we notice there's a bigger change on the website and we think it would be helpful to kind of have this change is reflected more in the search results a bit faster so we'll go off and crawl a little bit faster. So that's that's like that the changes you mentioned, like https, that's it that's an obvious one, or if your move domain then that's something where we see a couple of URLs and there are redirecting to a new domain, we think oh we can do this a little bit faster we'll just double check more or double check them a little bit faster than we otherwise would to make sure that we can reflect this change in the search results a bit faster.
It is interesting to watch, so here is the video embed:
So maybe a crawl spike can somewhat mean something is coming, at least on a site by site basis?
Forum discussion at Google+.
Update: John Mueller added some fun commentary on Google+ about this.
