Reduce the Google crawl rate

Google’s crawler infrastructure has sophisticated algorithms to determine the optimal crawl rate for a site. Our goal is to crawl as many pages from your site as we can on each visit without overwhelming your server. In some cases, Google’s crawling of your site might be causing a critical load on your infrastructure, or cause unwanted costs during an outage. To alleviate this, you may decide to reduce the number of requests made by Google’s crawlers.

Understand the cause of the sharp increase in crawling

Sharp increase in crawling may be caused by inefficiencies in your site’s structure or issues with your site otherwise. Based on the reports we’ve received in the past, the most common causes are:

• Inefficient configuration of URLs on the site, which is typically casued by a specific functionality of the site:
  • Faceted navigation or other sorting and filtering functionality of the site
  • A calendar with a lot of URLs for specific dates
• A Dynamic Search Ad target

We strongly recommend that you check with your hosting company and look at recent access logs of your server to understand the source of the traffic, and see if it fits in the aformentioned common causes of the sharp increase in crawling. Then, check our guides about managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs and optimizing crawling efficiency.

Urgently reduce crawler traffic (for emergencies)

If you need to urgently reduce the crawl rate for short period of time (for example, a couple of hours, or 1-2 days), then return 500, 503, or 429 HTTP response status code instead of 200 to the crawl requests. Google’s crawling infrastructure reduces your site’s crawling rate when it encounters a significant number of URLs with 500, 503, or 429 HTTP response status codes (for example, if you disabled your website). The reduced crawl rate affects the whole hostname of your site (for example, subdomain.example.com), both the crawling of the URLs that return errors, as well as the URLs that return content. Once the number of these errors is reduced, the crawl rate will automatically start increasing again.

Exceptional requests to reduce crawl rate

If serving errors to Google’s crawlers is not feasible on your infrastructure, file a special request to report a problem with unusually high crawl rate, mentioning the optimal rate for your site in your request. You cannot request an increase in crawl rate, and it may take several days for the request to be evaluated and fulfilled.