An important aspect of SEO is site crawl by bots and by regular and frequent visits by the crawler, it means Google appeals to your site and they love your site. Google crawl rate is the frequency with which Google bots visits your site and it vary to the type of your website and the content you publish and if bots can’t crawl your site efficiently, your many important pages and posts will not be indexed by Google and other search engines.
Note: You can’t force google bots to visit your site often and crawl, but you can request them to do so. Here’s a guide on How to index a website in 24 hours in google.
The best way to increase google crawl rate on your website is by having a good and proper navigation as it helps in deep crawling and indexing. This is the reason why News publishing website gets index so fast.
Google crawls and indexes your site by using bots and spiders, your site can only rank on search engine results page (SERP) if the bots and spiders have crawled and indexed it. Hence your website must have a good and regular crawl rate and you can make sure that your site indeed has a good site crawl rate by following the 15 ways to increase google crawl rate.
Create and Update your Site contents regularly.
Check your Server
Pay attention to load time
Fresh content and avoid duplication
Use sitemaps
Use Robots.txt
Adjust crawl rate in Google
Fetch as Google
Interlink your web pages and posts
Check links
Optimize images
Use ping services
Unique Meta title and Tags
Get more Social Shares
Use SSL (https)
1. Create and Update your Site contents regularly
It is always said Content is King and it is the most important element for search engines. Google bots like to crawl those websites that are regularly updated and produce more fresh contents. There are several sites that produce contents on daily basis by creating blog posts, videos and podcasts.
If you don’t create contents on daily basis it is recommended that you provide fresh contents at least 3 times a week and which will dramatically increase google crawl rate.
If you don’t create fresh contents even weekly, we advise you to at least update old contents. Static sites are crawled less often than dynamic sites.
2. Check your Server
Always host your blog on good reliable servers, you don’t want that search bots to visit your site when your website is facing downtime or many times on a cheap hosting the website faces downtime when the crawler visits your site as the performance of cheap servers are of cheap quality.
If google search bots get downtime every time it visits your website then it will automatically set the crawl time and your new contents won’t be indexed faster. There are several hosting sites but we have listed the best web hosting sites for you.
3. Pay attention to load time
Google bots have a budget time for your blog and it will only spend that limited time to crawl your blog. If for any reason google bot takes the time to crawl your resources then there will be no time left to visit your other pages.
So it is always recommended to host your blog on a reliable server. We always recommend using Bluehost as we any several other top bloggers like Pat Flynn uses it.
4. Fresh content and avoid duplication
Always create new contents and try to avoid duplication as google hates Plagiarism. Google’s algorithm is smart enough to find duplicate contents on your blog and if it finds it may stop crawling your site or banning or lowering your site ranking.
Contents can be anything, it can be a video, blog posting or podcasts but you should always try to create fresh and relevant contents.
There are several ways to optimize your contents for search engine and increase google crawl rates but if you duplicate your contents all will be in vain.
5. Use sitemaps
Almost every blog has a sitemap and by creating a sitemap for your blog you can make sure that your site is discovered by search engine bots. Creating sitemaps is no brainer especially in WordPress.
Google XML Sitemap Plugin can generate dynamic sitemaps which you can submit to webmasters Tools.
How To Submit Sitemap to Google Search Engine
6. Use Robots.txt
It’s dangerous and useless if search engine bots crawl pages that should not appear in search results like admin pages, folders where you store some files. So by creating a simple text file known as robots.txt which will help your stop bots from accessing and crawling those files.
Note: You can also stop bots from crawling affiliate links and outbound links.
Optimize WordPress SEO using Robots.txt
Controlling crawl index using Robots.txt
7. Adjust crawl rate in Google
You need to have a Google Webmasters Tools account to adjust the crawl rate and also monitor and optimize it. You can manually set the crawl rates and increase it. But I suggest you to only use this feature when you are facing some problems with google crawl bots or your site is not effectively crawled.
Note: Use it with Caution, Increasing the crawl rate can affect your site performance and face other issues.
8. Fetch as Google.
Google Webmasters Tool has a feature known as Fetch as Google. It helps you to test how Google crawls or renders a URL on your site and check if Googlebot can access the page on your site.It also reports if any resources are blocked to Googlebot.
The main use of this feature is to simulate real-time crawl and render execution as done by google bots while crawling.
9. Interlink your web pages and posts
Interlinking is the way to pass link juice to your other post and pages also help you to achieve effective PageRank. Interlinking also helps the search engine bots to crawl deep pages of your site that would be ignored or missed by search bots.
The way you can interlink is when you write a new post, add a relevance link to an old post /page and then go to related old posts and add a link to your new post there.
By doing this you will help the search bots to effectively crawl deep pages on your site.
10. Check links
Interlinking is the way of allowing bots to crawl several pages when they make a visit to your site. If you have seen you will find several post links are broken in our post and pages, because that’s intentionally broken, we sometimes schedule our post for future release as the post are in the draft.
We use an editorial calendar, broken link checker, and content management sheets to know exactly which link is dead and which link points to where.
11. Optimize images
Many bloggers are using images and infographics is now a trend but the problem is that google is unable to read and understand images directly. The only way google can understand an image is by the “alt” tag.
If proper alt tags are added then your images will also appear in the search results. Alt tags ensure that images are optimized for SEO and you should also consider having a separate sitemap for images for better crawling and indexing of media files and images.
Unoptimized images may hamper your performance and they may also cause poor crawl rate. So it is always recommended to optimize images for SEO.
12. Use ping services
The best way to let bots and crawlers know when your site gets updated or new contents is published is by pinging. WordPress has its own pinging feature integrated and you can ping google manually and automatic.
You can manually ping google by using services like pingomatic.And if you want WordPress to ping automatically then you can add more ping sites to your WordPress so that several bots gets notified.
You can find such list at Best WordPress Ping List for your Blog
13. Unique Meta title and Tags
Make sure you have a unique and relevant title and meta tags for each of your pages and blog post. Meta title and tags help your post stand out of the crowd and also the tags helps search engine and bots to identify the post type and help in increasing the google crawl rate.
Google search uses keywords and tags for SERP and also for indexing posts and pages and avoid duplicate contents.
How To Use Meta Keywords to Rank Higher
14. Get more Social Shares
Although google maintains that social shares are not a ranking factor but you can use social shares for another benefit. Since google bots crawl social sites regularly, your chances to get crawled by bots are more often.
Social shares can turn bots to boom your site by crawling. If your post gets 100 social shares it means you have created 100 points to get your site visited by bots to be crawled.
15. Use SSL (https)
Google has announced that using HTTPS and adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site will give you a minor ranking boost. To be said it is a minor change and will give the website a small ranking benefit but adding small ranking factors will definitely help you outrank your competitors. In their blog post, google has said that SSL has an impact on “fewer than 1% of global queries” but they also mentioned that they may strengthen the signal because Google wants to keep everyone safe on the web.
How to Get Free SSL for your Blog.
Conclusion
Its upto Google either it want to crawl and index your site or not you can just request the Googlebot to crawl your site. Since GoogleBot crawls most of the websites that are legit, this methods listed above will definitely help you increase your crawl rate.
We hope this article helped you know the best 15 ways to increase google crawl rate. You may also want to check out the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress and Essential WordPress SEO settings.
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Do you have experience with any of these? Would you add others to the list? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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