Google Crawl Rate Drops

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Google is crawling the internet at a much slower rate than they used to, based on observations of data in Google Webmaster Central. It’s not on all sites, but I can notice a considerable decline on many. Google hasn’t made any commentary on the subject so far, but speculation is focused on several areas.

Possible reasons that Google’s crawl rate might have dropped:

1) New eco-friendly crawling schedule
2) Large infrastructure changes at Google (both hardware and software algo)
3) A big switch to using information gleaned from Sitemaps

I’m sure many other possibilities exists but all of these seem plausible, if not likely. Whatever it is, it comes on the heels of massive changes in Google’s program. Now is the time to remain calm and focus on core site metric improvement, rather than get bogged down in the meanderings of a third party.

Google is really up to something big these days. Hopefully we’ll all live through it!

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