How Often Does Google Crawl Websites?

Quick Answer:

Google uses automated software called “crawlers” or “spiders” to scan the internet and index websites regularly. The frequency with which Google crawls a particular website can vary depending on several factors, such as the quality and relevance of the content, the number of other sites linking to it, and the site’s overall performance. In general, however, most websites can expect to be crawled by Google several times per week.

Google is the world’s biggest search engine and crawls websites continually. This helps Google index your website and find new content, but it can also cause duplicate content issues if you don’t take precautions to prevent them. Read this post to learn how often Google crawls sites and the risks of indexing too many pages.

Anyone who has dabbled in SEO has undoubtedly heard of “crawl” and “index.”

Crawling and indexing are two indispensable components of SEO that help your content rank and make it accessible to a user. While you might know the basics of the two terms, many factors influence the rate at which a website gets crawled or indexed.

Website owners often ask pertinent questions regarding the frequency of crawling, how to get their pages re-crawled after making changes, how long the crawling process takes, and how they can speed it up. Before we answer these questions, it makes sense to introduce you to the concept of Google crawling.

So, let’s get started!

What Is Google Crawling?

The Basics Explained: Crawling and Indexing

Crawling is an essential process in the SEO universe. In it, Google sends a bot to your website to read the content. When Google bots crawl your site, it means there is a probability that the content will rank on the web.

A widely accepted concept is that Google and other search engines, also called spiders, have little bots crawling through the whole Internet.

However, Google doesn’t discover the pages on its own. Website owners must submit a list of pages, a sitemap, to get Google to crawl their site. Once a URL is discovered, Google sends crawlers to the site to read all the fresh content, both text and non-text, such as video and visuals, and determine whether the page is worth indexing.

After a crawler visits your website and analyses the content, the link gets stored in Google indexes. We call this process indexing. Thus, the billions of pages are stored in a comprehensive database, and without access to the URLs, Google’s algorithm cannot discover or rank your content.

If there are new and updated pages you want in the Google index, you can submit indexing requests through the Google Search Console.

Does Google Crawl All Websites?

Google cannot crawl your site independently — it needs specific links and a sitemap to know about your site’s existence. Additionally, it does not crawl all pages. It starts with a specific set of pages it last crawled and follows the URLs present to discover new sites across the web.

The Google bots crawl billions of web pages and add links present on these pages to its database. As a result, Google discovers new sites and links and uses them to update its index.

Once Google discovers a new site, it sends a crawler to analyse the pages and see whether it has relevant and fresh content. It also examines the images and videos to assess what the page is all about. A blog post or article cited by other pages will likely be treated as an authority on a particular topic and indexed faster.

Thus, to ensure your site gets indexed and achieves a high ranking on Google’s SERPs, create an exciting and relevant site structure that appeals to user intent.

As a site owner, you can request Google to crawl your updated pages through Google Search Console. You can do this by uploading an XML sitemap with the URL of the pages you want Google to index. This is also how you can inform Google about the changes made on your existing pages and request a re-crawl.

Which Web Pages Are Not Crawled?

As stated earlier, Google uses a sitemap to access and index updated content. It crawls through billions of website pages daily, and if your site has hindrances preventing crawling, Google will stop sending bots over to your page.

This will affect indexing and your overall ranking. When bots cannot access your updated blog or article, your place in Google’s SEO rankings is reduced. Although the bots work efficiently to crawl pages, there are certain instances where a web page will not be crawled, and you cannot get Google to index them.

These situations include pages that are not accessible to anonymous users. If your page has password protection and is not open to random web users, the chances of a Google crawl are prevented. If your page has been previously crawled or has a duplicate URL, bots will not crawl it frequently.

Sometimes, robots.txt blocks certain pages, and Google cannot crawl them. So, check whether your URL has been blocked and make the necessary changes.

How Can I Tell If Google Has Crawled My Site?

Google will crawl your site once it has the link and access. However, you might be curious to know if Google has already crawled your site. If you are wondering whether your site has been crawled, your answer lies in your Google Search Console account. This tool helps site owners check whether Google bots visit their page and tell Google to index your site or page on demand.

Through your Google Search Console account, you can monitor Google visits by checking the last time bots visited your website and how often they crawled your page. These statistics help you understand the index potential of your site and what updates and changes you should make to improve SEO and get your content to rank higher.

In addition, you can ask Google Bot to re-crawl your pages through the search console and limit your crawl rate. One of the latest updates Google introduced was the URL inspection tool that gives more transparent information and helps site owners understand how Google views a particular site.

Upon entering your link in the Google Search Console, the engine provides data about the last crawl date, crawl errors encountered during the crawling or indexing process, and other pertinent information.

Although Google Analytics can help you segregate your traffic and determine what appeals to people who visit your site, you must know how to deal with your website content. We’ll talk more about this in the next section.

How Can I Make Google Crawl My Site Faster?

There are specific ways to improve your web content’s crawling frequency. These have been listed below:

1. Update Your Site

Add fresh content and new material to your site to boost the crawl rate. You can add relevant content to the blog section of your page and update it frequently with information pertaining to your industry. Remember to include videos, pictures, and graphs to improve readability. For instance, if you are a digital agency, you can write about SEO, Google Ads, etc.

2. Use Sitemaps

Merely updating content isn’t enough — you must submit these pages to the search engine results page.

Inform the Google Search Console about your updates using an XML sitemap. You can also link a new page to your existing pages that have ranked well. This helps bots discover and crawl your site faster. Besides, ensure your site is mobile-friendly.

3. Share Content

Sharing is one of the surest ways to draw attention to your site. Share your content on social platforms and within industry communities. You can also piggyback on the popularity of other sites by offering guest posts.

4. Use Internal Linking

Internal linking is another way to get search engines to notice your page. When other websites share or publish links to your content, it alerts Google and rewards you by sending bots over to your website that aid in the indexing process.

The higher the number of backlinks your page has, the higher the chance of attracting organic traffic to your website. Of course, the condition here is that your content needs to be reliable and credible.

5. Keep Your Data Structured

Ensure your data is SEO-compliant, incorporating proper meta tags and engaging titles, along with regular updates to your pages. Google uses its resources intelligently, so if your page is not accessible or your data isn’t well-structured, the search engine stops sending bots over to your page.

As a result, the chances of a user finding your site are minimised, and your index rank is reduced.

How Often Does Google Crawl A Site?

What bothers you is, “How often does Google crawl my site?” The short answer is that it is nearly impossible to know the exact rate, even if you are an expert in the digital marketing field.

But, certain factors can play a crucial role, as discussed above. Frequent website updates, domain authority, backlinks, etc., help increase the crawling frequency.

There is also something called a crawl budget that determines the number of pages Google bots crawl on your site during a particular timeframe. Optimising your crawl budget by adding new pages and eliminating dead links and redirects is important since their presence in your sitemap can impact your site’s indexing.

Summing Up How Long Before Google Crawls My Site?

As per Google, their bots frequently crawl internet pages to add them to their indexed database and update the SERPs.

The exact algorithm is unknown, but there are ways you can ensure your site gets efficiently and regularly crawled. Naturally, the more visitors you get, the more intrigued Google’s crawler will be by your page, and the higher the crawling rate. This will result in a higher ranking on SERPs.

Besides, ensure your page is fast and doesn’t encounter connectivity errors. What remains most important is the quality of your content, landing pages, and the visual layout of your webpage. It can take Google anywhere between 4 days to a month to crawl and index your site.

So, be patient and focus on adopting suitable strategies that improve the crawl rate!

It’s important to know SEO basics, but it’s also important to understand what is happening behind the scenes. Crawling and indexing are two indispensable components that help your content rank and make it accessible for a user.

Many factors influence how quickly a website will be crawled or indexed, including link popularity, site speed, bandwidth availability, page load time, etc.

Google will change its search results, and there’s a good chance it will occur at least once daily. If you want more information about crawling and indexing ranking factors and other aspects of digital marketing, we offer services such as search engine optimisation (SEO) consulting or web design in Australia; call us at 1300 755 306.

Kristi Ray

Kristi, the proficient head of content production and editing at sitecentre®, joined our Sunshine Coast team in early 2021. With a Bachelor’s degree in Public Relations, Advertising, and Applied Communication from the University of the Sunshine Coast, she utilises her diverse copywriting skills to accelerate the production of top-notch, SEO-friendly content. Her vast experience and deep understanding of the field ensure high-quality output for our partners.

Find them on their website: sitecentre®.