If you’ve been researching SEO, you’ll know Google updates its search engine algorithm fairly regularly. But how often does Google crawl a website? In this article, we explore how often Google crawls your website, with information on when you can expect to see your website updates reflected in search engine results pages.
It’s typically thought that Google crawls websites every three to four weeks. However, this can be influenced by various factors including:
- How large your website is
- How long your website has existed for
- The number of visitors to your website
- If your website follows Google guidelines
You can check when a page was most recently crawled in Google Search Console under Indexing – Pages:
Google’s stance: Aiming to decrease crawling
In April 2024, Google’s Gary Illyes stated:
“My mission this year is to figure out how to crawl even less, and have fewer bytes on wire.
A few days ago there was a post on a Reddit community about how, in the OC’s perception, Google is crawling less than previous years. In the grand scheme of things that’s just not the case; we’re crawling roughly as much as before, however scheduling got more intelligent and we’re focusing more on URLs that more likely to deserve crawling.
However, we should, in fact, crawl less. We should, for example, be more intelligent about caching and internal cache sharing among user agents, and we should have fewer bytes on wire.
If you’ve seen an interesting IETF (or other standards body) internet draft that could help with this effort, or an actual standard I might’ve missed, send it my way. Decreasing crawling without sacrificing crawl-quality would benefit everyone.”
How long does it take Google to crawl my website?
It can take Google anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks, depending on your website’s size. Requesting indexing can speed things up, however, there’s no set timeline on how long you can expect Google to take to crawl your website.
How can I prompt Google to crawl pages on my website?
Through Google Search Console, visit ‘URL Inspection’. Through this section, you can ‘Request Indexing’ of specific URLs, if you have added a new page or recently updated a page for example.
Adhering to SEO best practices like ensuring your content is internally linked can help Google to find your pages, helping with faster crawling and indexing.
Why hasn’t Google crawled some of my pages recently?
You may notice that the usual three to four weeks crawling schedule hasn’t applied for some of your pages. This could be due to a number of factors, including:
- Low-quality content that Google does not deem worth indexing
- Lack of backlinks: If your content doesn’t have backlinks from reputable sites, Google may not deem it worth crawling and indexing
- Poor website navigation: A poorly structured website can make it more difficult for Google to find your pages and therefore crawl and index your pages
- If you have a large website, this may affect your crawl budget and the number of pages Google is able to crawl
- Technical issues
- Robots.txt issues: Check your robots.txt file to make sure you’re not accidentally blocking Google from crawling pages on your site
- Google penalties
How to identify and solve crawling issues:
1. Use Google Search Console
Your first port of call in identifying any crawling and indexing issues is checking Google Search Console.
Navigate to ‘Indexing’ > ‘Pages’ to view information on your not-indexed and indexed pages, and scroll down to see the reasons why pages are not indexed.
2. Review Robots.txt
Your next port of call is checking your site’s robots.txt file to ensure it’s not unintentionally blocking any pages you want indexed.
This file acts as a set of instructions for search engine crawlers, telling them which areas of your site they can and cannot access. While it’s useful for preventing bots from crawling duplicate pages, admin sections, or private content, a misconfigured robots.txt file can accidentally block important pages, preventing them from appearing in search results. If key pages are restricted, Google may not be able to discover or index them properly, which can significantly impact your site’s visibility.
3. Fix technical issues
Fixing technical issues on your website is crucial for improving Google’s ability to crawl and index your pages effectively. When search engine bots encounter broken links, slow-loading pages, or improper URL structures, they may struggle to navigate your site, leading to incomplete indexing or lower rankings. Issues like duplicate content, missing meta tags, and improper use of robots.txt can also send conflicting signals to search engines, potentially preventing important pages from being discovered. By resolving these problems — optimising site speed, ensuring proper internal linking, and maintaining a clean sitemap — you create a more accessible and search-friendly website. This not only helps Google crawl your content more efficiently but also enhances your chances of ranking higher in search results.
4. Enhance content quality
Enhancing your content quality by adhering to Google’s quality guidelines, such as E.E.A.T (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) can help Google to crawl and index your site. The more useful Google deems your content to be, the higher it will be ranked. The more visitors to your webpage, and the more useful Google finds your content, the more regularly it’ll be crawled.
Regularly updating your content is important to keep it fresh, relevant, and of the highest quality.
5. Build backlinks
Building backlinks to key pages you want to be crawled is key for the discoverability of your pages. You can build backlinks from other reputable sites to help Google discover your webpages, and internally link from your own website pages to cross-reference your content.
6. Improve your website’s structure
Google takes into account your website structure when crawling pages. Your highest priority pages should be at the very top of your navigation. Google looks at pages’ placement in the website navigation to ascertain the relationship between pages, so considering your website’s structure carefully can help to provide context to Google and improve the user experience.
Crawling and Indexation FAQs
Yes, Google does automatically crawl websites. Google uses automated web crawlers to crawl the web regularly to automatically add webpages to the Google index.
You can encourage Google to speed up crawling of your site by adding content regularly, submitting a sitemap, using internal links to help Google find key content, and through asking Google to recrawl your pages through Google Search Console.
Factors that influence how often Google crawls your site include the size of your website; the larger the site is, and those with more regular updates tend to be crawled more frequently. How long your website has existed and the popularity of your site can also affect how often Google crawls your site.
Yes! You can use Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool to see when Google last crawled a page.
The more popular your site is, generally, the more Google will crawl your site.
You can use Google Search Console to monitor Google’s crawl rate of your website.
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