Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast, posted some interesting data on Twitter yesterday around crawlers and how much they consume of their site, how active they are and if there is any return on investment. The big one is that Bing crawled ~84,000 URLs on Yoast.com over the past 30 days and only returned about 3,200 visitors to their site in that time period. And this is with Yoast ranking well in Bing.
Joost said not only that, Bing is consistently crawls more 404s than all the other engines, and seems to keep doing so. "404s are often not cached. This is costing lots and lots of server time, electricity etc," he said.
Bing on the Yoast servers consumed 10 GB of data in that 30 day time period. All for only 3,200 visitors.
Our logs show @bing consistently crawls more 404s than all the other engines, and seems to keep doing so. 404s are often not cached. This is costing lots and lots of server time, electricity etc.
— Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) May 30, 2018
On our servers, it consumed 10 GB of data in those 30 days.
Then Joost goes into SEO tools and how much data they consume. Calling out ahrefs as a pretty bad one.
In terms of "getting something back" there's one thing that's worse than search engines with a small market share. It's link research tools.@ahrefs consumed 5GB of data from our servers, hitting approximately 2,000 URLS/day. @moz was way nicer, with only 250MB.
— Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) May 30, 2018
He then goes on to say that Yoast is one web site and not even a big web site. Thus how much are these search engines and SEO tools consuming across all of the web? How much damage are these spiders causing to the world's "green efforts."
Even *if* @Google is making sure all the electricity *they* use is green, they're not buying green electricity for all the sites they hit. Nor are all those other bandwidth consuming bots.
— Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) May 30, 2018
Anyway, check out the Twitter thread, it is super interesting.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
