November 18, 2008 by Eddy Philipe
People often come to us with questions about their crawl rate, by which I mean the frequency with which Google visits your site to check its status. How important is it? How can I increase the frequency of visits? Etc.
I’ll answer the first question first as it’s the easiest. The answer is, very! Actually, the frequency with which your site is crawled could be described the most important metric there is since it gives a pretty accurate picture of just how important Google thinks your site is.
So how can you improve it? Well, unfortunately there’s no real way to simply command the search engine spiders to visit, stubborn as they are, though you can create a welcoming environment. Here’s a techniques for doing so…
1. Add your site to Google Webmasters tools. This will allow you to see the parts of your site that may be unreachable to the spiders, you can then fix these. With webmaster tools you can also manually increase the crawl rate with the touch of a button by sending a request to Google, the new rate will be valid for 90 days and is the simplest way to get those spiders over more regularly. Do it today.
2.Update your content. You probably knew that was coming didn’t you. Sorry but there really is no substitute for fresh content, go for three updates a week to begin with. Remember, users like it, so Google and the spiders will too.
3.If you have a blog add automatic pinging to it. For the uninitiated, that’s a service that pings Google automatically telling it to crawl after a new post is put up. You’ll probably find this service offered by your blog provider in the admin area.
More tips next time…
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