How Often Does Google Crawl Your Site?

Google has large problems trying to crawl all web pages on the internet.

With trillions of pages, Googlebot works non-stop to attempt to crawl everything published online.

There is a massive amount of content for Googlebot to get through and depending on how active your site is can affect the crawl ability of your website.

On average Google crawls your site between three to twenty days. Websites updated regularly tend to be crawled by Googlebot more as looking to hunt for new content first. Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

If your site has not been crawled in the previous few weeks you should run a technical audit to check for possible crawl errors.

In our Google crawl guide, we’ll discuss more details about Google’s crawling abilities in April 2024.

What Is Crawling?

Crawling is how Google find new and updated pages.

Googlebot is constantly searching and crawling new web pages published on the internet.

Google initially crawls the internet via Googlebot and looks to index content to the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

How Can You Get Google to Crawl Your Site?

You can get Google to crawl your site through many different methods.

Firstly, ensure that your website has a sitemap and that this sitemap is submitted. This may seem like an obvious one, but there are actually a surprising number of sites that don’t even have their sitemap set up.

Without a sitemap, Google will find it much more difficult to find your pages, especially new pages, and as a result, you will have a much harder job of indexing pages.

Ensure that your website architecture and internal linking structure is sufficient. This will massively help Google crawl your whole website and navigate through each page.

Having a great internal linking silo also helps user experience by allowing users of your website to navigate from page to page.

For new pages, you can also use Google Search Console to manually submit your page for indexing. Simply go to GSC and enter your URL.

How Can You Tell if Google Is Crawling Your Site?

It can take a few days for Google to crawl a site, however, there are a few ways of checking and speeding up this process.

The easiest way of checking if Google has crawled your site is by manually checking if a page is indexed.

If you use the search parameter ‘site:’ and then enter your domain you can see every page that is indexed on your site. Or if you replace the domain with an individual page URL you can check if that URL is indexed.

Another great way of checking if your site has been crawled is by connecting and using Google Search Console. GSC is an essential tool for any website and will tell you the number of indexed pages on your site.

You can also use the search console to check if a page is indexed by entering it in the ‘Inspect’ box.

What Should You Do if Google Is Not Crawling Your Site?

If Google is not crawling your website, you firstly need to analyse why this is. 9 times out of 10 there is an obvious reason to this as Google are a pretty reliable search engine when it comes to indexing a site.

A common issue with new websites is that they can’t be read. Ensure that you have allowed your site to be indexed by search engines to avoid this.

Also, make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. It’s more important now than ever that sites are optimised for mobile and not just desktop.

Another potential issue is that your website is running too slowly. If a page takes too long to load, Google’s spiders will stop trying to crawl the site to avoid server timeouts.

Here is a list provided by this in-depth article provided by Search Engine Journal.

• You Don’t Have A Domain Name
• Your Site Is Not Mobile-Friendly
• You’re Using A Coding Language In A Way That’s Too Complex for Google
• Your Site Loads Slowly
• Your Site Has Minimal Well-Written Content
• Your Site Isn’t User-friendly And Engaging To Visitors
• You Have A Redirect Loop
• You’re Using Plugins That Block Googlebot from Crawling Your Site
• Your Site Uses JavaScript To Render Content
• You Did Not Add All Domain Properties To Google Search Console
• Your Meta Tags Are Set To Noindex, Nofollow
• You’re Not Using A Sitemap
• You’ve Been Penalized By Google In The Past And Haven’t Cleaned Up Your Act Yet
• Your Technical SEO Is Terrible

If you are happy with your website and are convinced none of these issues are present, and your internal linking silo is perfect, you should manually fetch your homepage using Google Search Console.

How Do I Get Google to Re Crawl My Site?

To get Google to recrawl your site, make sure that you are regularly updating your content to keep it fresh.

Fresh content is crucial if you are looking for Google to crawl your site regularly as their spiders will notice regular changes and keep coming back to your webpage.

It’s also important to make sure your internal linking silo is set up correctly as Google will automatically follow links during a crawl and will consequently crawl other pages too.

You can also manually fetch and render your pages to force Google’s spiders to crawl your site.

How Do I Improve Google Crawling?

You can improve the crawl rate of your site by ensuring that your content is freshened regularly. By updating content frequently, you are telling Google to continue returning to your site to recrawl.

You should also make sure that your site is loading fast and correctly. Google particularly doesn’t like slow pages and will often not fully crawl a page if it is super slow.

Other than that, you should follow SEO basics for your website and make sure Google Search Console is completed with the correct information including the correct sitemap.

I’d also recommend that you obtain a few backlinks from other websites as Google can follow external links to other sites which definitely helps with crawl rate.

Does Google Crawl Every Website?

Google does not crawl every website. Google certainly does not guarantee that it will crawl, index or serve a page even if it follows the guidelines of the Google Search Essentials.

However, there is no reason why your site won’t be crawled if you have set up the website correctly and undertaken the main SEO practices.

You can also ask Google to crawl your pages manually, so getting them to crawl and index your site should not be an issue if you are setting the site up correctly.

Summary

Crawling and indexing your content are the core fundamentals of SEO because a perfectly written page that cannot be crawled is worthless.

Crawl budget can be an issue on huge domains lacking backlinks or not often updated.

You usually don’t have to worry about the crawl budget on aged domains with a large backlink profile and well-optimised content.

If you are creating a new website with a lot of pages the crawl budget can be a concern.

Crawl budget can be a concern for newer sites, especially those with a lot of pages.

Regularly update your content with progressive optimisation strategies and look to acquire quality backlinks to improve the indexation and crawling of your site.

James Dooley

Entrepreneur

James Dooley is a British entrepreneur, SEO, investor, and philanthropist. James has built a huge Search Engine Optimization team that focus on organic SEO endeavours, including affiliate marketing, lead generation, as well as SEO services.