Google: More Crawling Doesn't Mean Things Are Better (i.e. Rankings)

Apr 9, 2019 - 8:17 am 1 by

Google Ladder

Google's John Mueller had to reiterate what he said a couple times now, this time on Reddit - saying "More crawling doesn't mean things (like rankings) are better." He said it is a common misconception but he did add "it just means Google is able to see changes a little bit faster."

In short, just because Google crawls your site a lot or crawls your site very infrequently - it doesn't mean your site will have a higher or lower ranking. Crawl rate is about your crawl budget and if Google thinks they will find new content and changes on your site. Static sites that don't change much can rank well but they don't need to be crawled as often. Sites that add a lot of new content - like this site - can be crawled a lot and then also not rank well. :)

Here is what John said on Reddit:

Edit: I should probably add a bit more :-). Google will start to crawl your site when there's a link somewhere which is recognized, or when you've submitted it for indexing. In general, after that, if Google sees that your site is awesome (for some value of that at least), then it'll continue to crawl & index regularly, and try to pick up more and more pages from your site. There's a lot that factors into how often & how much of a site is crawled, but a lot of that maps back to trying to figure out "awesomeness". More crawling doesn't mean things (like rankings) are better - that's a common misconception - it just means Google is able to see changes a little bit faster.

Yep - the awesomeness comment is back.

Forum discussion at Reddit.

 

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