Site crawling is an important aspect of SEO and if bots can’t crawl your site effectively, you will notice many important pages are not indexed in Google or other search engines.
A site with proper navigation helps in deep crawling and indexing of your site. Especially, for a news site it’s important that Search engine bots should be indexing your site within minutes of publishing and that will happen when bots can crawl site ASAP you publish something.
There are many things which we can do to increase the effective site crawl rate and get faster indexing. Search engines use spiders and bots to crawl your website for indexing and ranking.
Your site can only be included in search engine results pages (SERP’s) if it is in the search engine’s index. Otherwise, customers will have to type in your URL to get to your site. Hence you must have a good and proper crawling rate of your website or blog to succeed.
Here I’m sharing most effective ways to increase site crawl rate and increase visibility in popular search engines.
How To Get Google To Increase Site Crawl Rate
As I mentioned, you could do many things to get search engine bots to find your site faster.
Before I get into the technical aspect of crawling, in simple words: Search engine bots follow links to crawl a new link and one easy way to get search engine bots index quickly, get your site link on popular sites by commenting, guest posting.
If not, there are many other things we can do from our end like Site pinging, Sitemap submission and controlling crawling rate by using Robots.txt. I will be talking about a few of these methods which will help you to increase Google crawl rate and get bots to crawl your site faster and better way.
1. Interlink your blog pages like a pro:
Interlinking not only helps you to pass link juice but also help search engine bots to crawl deep pages of your site. When you publish a new page, interlink it from old pages, and this helps search engine discover new pages quickly.
As of now, if you are using Programmatic SEO and ChatGPT to build pages in bulk, you should use an automated method like Linkwhisper or similar to automatically create internal link.
Watch this video to understand how LinkWhisper works:
This will no directly help in increasing Google crawl rate but will help bots to effectively crawl deep pages on your site.
2. Publish New Content Content Regularly
Content is by far the most important criteria for search engines. Sites that update their content on a regular basis are more likely to get crawled more frequently. Make sure to create new pages on your website on a regular basis.
If you are using Programmatic SEO to create pages in bulk, do not publish all pages at one go. Rather drip-feed, so that Google doesn’t assume that your website is hacked, and might put it in Sandbox or delist from Google search.
This is simpler than trying to add web pages or constantly changing your page content. Static sites are crawled less often than those that provide new content.
Many sites provide daily content updates. Blogs are the easiest and most affordable way to produce new content on a regular basis. But you can also add new videos or audio streams to your site. It is recommended that you provide fresh content at least three times each week to improve your crawl rate.
3 . Server with Good Uptime
Host your blog on a reliable server with good uptime. Nobody wants Google bots to visit their blog during downtime. In fact, if your site is down for long, Google crawlers will set their crawling rate accordingly and you will find it harder to get your new content indexed faster.
There are many Good hosting sites that offers 99%+ uptime and you can look at them at suggested WebHosting page.
You are free to use anything you want, but I prefer to use Kinsta hosting, and it has served ShoutMeLoud really well since the past 6 years.
4. Create and submit Sitemaps
Sitemap submission is one of the first few things which you can do to make your site discover fast by search engine bots. In WordPress, you can use any WordPress SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO to generate a dynamic sitemap and submit it to Webmaster tool.
5. Avoid Duplicate Content
Copied content decreases crawl rates. Search engines can easily pick up on duplicate content. This can result in less of your site being crawled. It can also result in the search engine banning your site or lowering your ranking.
You should provide fresh and relevant content. Content can be anything from blog postings to videos. There are many ways to optimize your content for search engines.
Using those tactics can also improve your crawl rate. It is a good idea to verify you have no duplicate content on your site. Duplicate content can be between pages or between websites. There are free content duplication resources available online you can use to authenticate your site content.
6. Reduce your site Loading Time
Mind your page load time, Note that the crawl works on a budget– if it spends too much time crawling your huge images or PDFs, there will be no time left to visit your other pages.
- Run a website Speed audit and identify which are slowest loading pages
- Take action to remove elements or optimise elements like images, pdf to speed up pages
- Use Robots.txt to prevent crawling of heavy files on your website.
Read my free guide on how to speed up WordPress below:
7. Block access to the unwanted pages via Robots.txt
There is no point letting search engine bots crawling useless pages like admin pages, back-end folders as we don’t index them in Google and so there is no point letting them crawl such part of the site.
Simple editing on Robots.txt will help you to stop bots from crawling such useless part of your site. You can learn more about Robots.txt for WordPress below:
- Optimize WordPress robots.txt file for SEO
- Use Robots.txt to protect site from duplicate content
- Controlling crawl index using Robots.txt
8. Monitor and Optimize Google Crawl Rate
Now You can also monitor and optimize Google Crawl rate using Google search console. Just go to the crawl stats there and analyze.
You can manually set your Google crawl rate and increase it to faster as given below. Though I would suggest use it with caution and use it only when you are actually facing issues with bots not crawling your site effectively.
You can read more about changing Google crawl rate here.
9. Don’t forget to Optimize Images
Crawlers are unable to read images directly. If you use images, be sure to use alt tags to provide a description that search engines can index. Images are included in search results but only if they are properly optimized. You can learn about Image Optimization for SEO here, and you should also submit image sitemap to Google.
Use this simple plugin called Shortpixel to optimise images in WordPress. Read detailed Shortpixel review if you wish to dive deep.
This will help bots to find all your images, and you can expect a decent amount of traffic from search engine bots if you have taken care of image alt tag properly.
Well, these are few tips that I can think of which will help you to increase site crawl rate and get better indexing in Google or other search engines. The last tip which I would like to add here is, add your sitemap link in the footer of your site.
This will help bots to find your sitemap page quickly, and they can crawl and index deep pages of your site from the sitemap.
Do let us know if you are following any other method to increase Google crawl rate of your site? If you find this post useful, don’t forget to tweet and share it on WhatsApp.
I am impressed with your method to increase the index ratio as well as the fresh factors of a website. I think another trick that you can use is using recent comment or recent post widget to make all of website content change frequently
Very useful, My sites Crowl Speed is very Slow, i will try this all Method.
This is very useful for me, if it work
Is interlinking really help to increase google crawl rate.
@Rakesh
interlinking helps in better crawling.
what If I just make a single web page, paste every single web page URL inside my website into that one web page, then submit that one web page URL to Google? Will Goggle bots automatically index every URL I pasted inside my new web page?
Hello,
I had all images hosted on external server.. Now I upload all images on my server and I had moved all old images on my server too..
Problem is that from last 2 weeks when I started to do that, none of images hosted on my server are indexed(pages are)
Anyone knows why? Is there a time that I should wait?
Thanks!
Thanks, I have done all the above. For Ping Service Can you suggest some automatic service?
Yes. very affective option is daily update of your site content. In my case, interlinking also very useful.
@Sojan
Interlinking helps in deeper indexing of the site more than increasing the crawl rate. Publishing more often & in regular number is the best route to increase crawl rate.
Hi sir,
really a helpful post. Some of the thinks that mentioned above are known to me.But I got more procedures and tricks from this post which are new to me.I will definitely try to do apply these on my blog.
Do anyone knows how to set Custom Crawl rate at Google Webmasters Tool.
As you can see in 7th point of this blog, you can set custom crawl rate.
Follow this below steps to change the crawl rate:
On the Search Console Home page, click the site you want.
Click the gear icon , then click Site Settings.
In the Crawl rate section, select the option you want.
We just added a twitter timeline. We hope it increases our crawl rate. Question, in our timeline we choose to display tweets with certain keywords. will those keywords help our onpage seo also.
For point 10 submit site to directories DMOZ is pretty easy, but to be accepted into directories like DMOZ need time 🙂
@Chyardi
I agree…Getting inside DMOZ is tough, and not sure what all criteria they actually look before accepting any website. They should come up with paid solution for small businesses, as DMOZ is still seen as a standard directory.
If sites like DMOZ will come up with paid solutions then they will be flooded with Spam and Big Players. Right now small businesses with good content sites have probability to get into DMOZ. If DMOZ gets paid they will not get place in DMOZ too.
Does Improved Crawl rate Increase Traffic?
Is there any Direct or indirect Relations Between theme?
If yes, Please Provide me Over View.
Yes Nikhil, Improved Crawl rate can also Increase web traffic as well. For ex- If you have to post some latest news you will get done by now and your post will rank higher and clicked by many users instead of waiting your post to get listed on Google search later on.
Getting indexed fast doesn’t mean that is going to rank for it. However, there is another way of manually indexing your pages. Go to webmaster tools then fetch your page as google and click on submit to index. Your post will show in google within a few seconds.
Awesome tips. Submitting blog to online Directories is very useful and also submitting sitemap to Google is important. Thanks Karan for these excellent tips 🙂
i do all the things you have mentioned above but still i found out that my site was last crawled on july 26….is there any way we can force google into crawling our site,,,and the option of fetch as google bot,,does it make google to crawl the site
I’ve a question mate. Why we need to crawl our website fast in google? What’s advantage dude? 🙂
I’d love to hear from you!
Choose web hosting carefully, because it effects crawl rate if there is more down time and loading time…
Read the whole of it.
Retweeted it, LIKE-d it on facebook and shared it on Google plus because it contains lots of useful information.
Written in an extremely understandable language (making it easier for a person with a non technical base like me to understand it), it would benefit any new blogger immensely.
Could you suggest me a few good directories for submission in the health niche`?
I tries above steps 1,4,6,10,11,12 it’s really worked.Useful tip for new bloggers.
It will very helpfull to increase traffic for new website. All of the mentioned point definetly help us to grow crawl. Thanks to provide such kind of information.
SEO Smartlinks is a great plugin that can help interlink like a pro
Wow….Great tips dude…i will do every steps today onwards….thanks lot…keep sharing dude..