Google: Some But Not All Algorithms May Trigger Spikes In Crawl Rates

Gary Illyes from Google said yesterday that some baby algorithms may trigger a spike in crawl rates. He said some, not all, of these algorithms may do that. Now, in 2016, the same Gary Illyes said algorithm updates do not trigger crawl rate spikes or changes. Gary said crawl rate spikes are unrelated to Google algorithm updates back then.

First., here are tweets from what Gary Illyes said on stage yesterday:

Q: Does crawling increase prior to an algo update.
A: It depends. "We have millions of baby algorithms and they might trigger something that increases crawl rate on certain sites, but not a blanket thing."@methode @jenstar #Pubcon

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 10, 2019

#GaryAMA
Q. Does Google increase crawling before an algo update?
It depends. But do not always need a crawl before. #Pubcon @jenstar

— Kristine Schachinger (@schachin) October 10, 2019

Here is what Gary Illyes said in 2016:

@rustybrick myth

— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) February 11, 2016

Now, what he may be referring to is how being switched to mobile-first indexing increases crawl activity or maybe things have changes in the past three-years.

But SEOs for a long long time felt that often spikes in crawl rates can represent a new algorithm update about to touch down.

Here is a video of Gary explaining this better in 2016:

Forum discussion at Twitter.