How to Increase the Frequency of Google Crawlers

Comments Off on How to Increase the Frequency of Google Crawlers, 20/12/2012, by , in Google

Crawlers like pinging sites that are up-to-date, encompassing and well-received. One of the best ways to ensure your content is being discovered and indexed by major search engines is to ensure that search engine crawlers are visiting your website as often as possible. A default site with no search engine optimization may not be visited by crawlers all that often; newer websites would also fall into this category. Over the long term, however, you can increase the frequency at which crawlers visit your website by working on an array of different elements of your website.

Bump Up the PR

While PageRank for Google has increasingly become less and less relevant, there is one area in which it does have value: search crawler frequency. Google will index your site more often if your website is PR7 as opposed to PR5. If you can manage to increase your PR over the long-term, you will find a remarkable amount of benefit when it comes to near instantaneous updates.

Have Dynamic Content

The best way to keep crawlers returning to your site is to have fresh content being added regularly. One great example is a blog, which can provide readers with valuable information and boost your update frequency at the same time. You can also use status feeds from social networking platforms on your site as a way to alert search engines that the content of your page is in flux.

Do Not Create Duplicate Content

If you have paragraphs of similar content that are on multiple pages, you may discover that search engine crawlers have stopped visiting as often. This is because they view the site as relatively static and also potentially as a site that is attempting to trick search engine algorithms into believing they are a better website in theory than in practice. Make sure that duplicated content is restricted to short phrases and not entire sentences and paragraphs.

Decrease Page/File Sizes

Sites that are large users of bandwidth can find updates to be few and far between. Search engine crawlers are designed to be as efficient as possible. If a certain page or site is much larger than what is considered normal or average, then the crawler will probably be pinging sites other than yours if there is a heavy current workload on the part of the crawler. By reducing the total file size of each page when possible, you can eliminate this discrimination that is done by search engines.

Create A Sitemap

Sitemaps exist to help users find content that is located in directories and sub-directories of your website, but its real purpose helps search engine crawlers locate every page on your website. If you currently have pages with no direct incoming links from other parts of your site, they may be getting overlooked by crawlers. A proper sitemap will provide crawlers with the opportunity to index each individual page located on your website – giving it more saturation within Google Search.

Conclusion

With just a few simple additions and tweaks, you can drastically increase the frequency at which Google indexes your site. These minimally invasive tips can save you a lot of frustration and hopefully provide your website with more traffic in the future.