Drastic Decline in Google Crawl Rate - 7-8 Oct - Google Search and SEO forum at WebmasterWorld

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Drastic Decline in Google Crawl Rate - 7-8 Oct

Gorgwatcher

5:23 am on Oct 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

We are experiencing a constant decline in Google Crawl since 8 Oct. Yesterday the situation worsens when the crawl rate touched almost bottom of the graph.

We have checked all possible factors including robots.txt, robot meta tags, recent updation in website, downtime but nothing seems odd.

Has anyone else experienced such situation?

PS: We also had a title change in google Serps for our brandname. Instead of whole title tag its just showing our main name.

tedster

2:06 pm on Oct 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

On page changes don't affect crawling. Most of the time, it's an internal cycle at Google. Are you publishing new pages that are not being indexed?

scottsonline

3:39 am on Oct 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

We had a peak a short while ago, now indexing had dropped. I'm absolutely convinced something is going on. Just like pre mayday I'm noting some BIG blog sites stopped getting their pages indexed a couple of days back. I'm also noting cache dates rolling backwards on some sites.

Anyone else keeping track of page indexing? Seems like another piece to the puzzle.

SEOPTI

3:49 am on Oct 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

Lowest indexing since July, 70% drop.

scottsonline

5:33 am on Oct 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

At this point last night I was reviewing a cache page from a huge competitor. It went from 10/12 to 9/20 today. Our site unrolled too.

Amazon is first in many terms even for items they don't carry. Sites are ranking on competitive longtAil terms that are closed. Ie, the pages were indexed in July and the business folded in august. Yet they're #2 in many cases. Odd stuff.

I wish more people were seeing this but maybe it's just ecommerce sites.

tedster

5:47 am on Oct 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

This is the time of year - just before Halloween - when we've seen ecommerce algo shake-ups in the past. Then it always reverted after the New Year. This year just may be following that same pattern, but if so it's about a week ahead of schedule.

scottsonline

1:29 pm on Oct 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

Ted in the past did these exact changes stay in place or did it morph?

In our niche one of the top three spots has been taken up for four days by a site that is closed for business. What I did just figure out is that it was an unknown competitors duplicate site. So the idea of buying a template, an expired domain and exporting an XML file is still alive and well particularly in our niche

tedster

3:25 pm on Oct 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

With Google, things always morph. But something more basic in the algo always seemed to shift around the Q4 holiday period - more transactional results than during other parts of the year.

scottsonline

4:09 pm on Oct 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

Interesting thanks. In our niche they have gone the other way it seems. Its behaving more like a major as of yet unnamed changed mainly because of the introduction of new never before seen sites and also amazon at #1.

There are terms we ranked 1 on last week that brought converting clicks where not only are we not there, but none of our competitors are either. Much like the post mayday days. My money is on an unannounced major change wiring it's way through the web over the next week.