A common question that many webmasters have about ranking their pages after launch is how they can get Google to crawl their site faster. Indexing a page to display changes can be crucial for SEO. If you have optimized a page or you have added new content to your page, it is likely that you will want that content crawled ASAP to maximize the rankings improvements that you can see from that content.
There are a few factors that can make Google slow to crawl a website. If Google can’t find quality links in the content, it is likely that it is going to place less importance on crawling the site. If there are a large number of links going to your page from high authority sources, Google will be much more likely to crawl your site as a priority.
Another main factor that can cause your site to fall in priority is errors. If your site regularly has a series of errors that can prevent Google from crawling it, the site will be far less likely to receive search engine crawling. Too many errors can work directly against you.
The largest factors that could be preventing your page from being crawled include:
A Low Authority
When your site has little in the way of quality inbound links, Google will place it very low on the list of sites that it needs to crawl. A site with low authority from its links will always be crawled after a site that has a mass following or a large number of inbound links from high authority websites.
When you have done some link building, you may start to notice that Google will index your content faster. Working on improving your link building and co-ordinating with high authority sites for inbound links can be a wonderful strategy that you can use to improve the speed that Google will crawl your site.
Technical Reasons
Google will often ignore a site for crawling due to technical reasons as well. The main technical reasons that Google may avoid crawling your site are that it includes too many URLs or that there are too many errors and that your site is too slow. Some of the main issues that you should watch for in technical reasons include:
A Slow Server
Google may consider crawling your site slowly if your site is slow to load due to the hosting that you are using. If your website is very slow to respond to requests, loads other bulky resources due to the other sites on your host or other factors to do with your website, Google may be lowering the overall crawl frequency of that website for technical reasons. If you’re having ongoing issues with lightspeed or server issues you might want to consider changing your host.
Errors On Your Site
You may have a series of pages with errors on them. Making sure to publish a redirect notice for these pages can make sure that Google search console will avoid these erring pages; this will help future pages to be indexed quicker. In order to prevent your site from being crawled slowly, you need to regularly look at 404 errors across the site and fix them with redirects.
Too Many URLs
If you have too many URLs to the site it can take Google a long time to crawl it. Fixing your navigation can make sure that Google will crawl your site much faster. Manually fixing your site map or working to improve navigation features will make sure that any new content you publish can be crawled faster.
The Best Way To Improve Crawl Speed
At the core of improving crawling speed is fixing errors on your site and making sure that it can perform as fast as possible. Proper optimization of your site, regular testing and making sure that your pages do not produce errors can be important.
A site map can also be an easy way that you can submit your site to search engines. If you do not currently have an XML site map for your webpage, adding this feature to your page will make sure that you can crawl the site more easily.
If having all of these items in place still fails to improve the crawl speed for your page, you may want to consider starting with link building. As you continue to build up links, this will increase the priority for your page and lead to Google crawling your content much faster.
If you have noticed that Google is slow to crawl your content and you would like to improve the rate that your content is being crawled, make sure that you can form a plan for improving your page. Contact us today for a free consultation if your issues persist!
