Google may be crawling sites more and harder over the past several days. The WebmasterWorld forums has several SEOs saying they are seeing significant spikes in crawl rates by GoogleBot.
Also, I checked dozens of sites in the old Google Search Console, to see the crawl stats and most, not all, but most, have a significant spike in crawling.
Here is one of many screen shots from the crawl stats section within Google Search Console:
Here are some of the comments from WebmasterWorld:
Huge crawling on my site today, far more than usual. Does anyone experience this? There may be something on the way from big G.
I can confirm the big spike in crawling on my site today. Last spike this large was at Mid-July.
I'm observing the same. Also, the only traffic Google is sending is Gbot which is unusual as well. Normally Google sends some low quality non-converting traffic to fill the void, and they are not doing that either. It's just dead except for Gbot.
Have you noticed large spikes in crawling? Note, Google has said crawl spikes do not mean algorithm updates are about to happen.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
