How often does Googlebot visit a dormant site?

4 replies
  • SEO
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Hi,
I have a website that I posted several initial pages (and a few backlinks) and left to work on later. I had not updated it for 6 months or so.

Anyway, I am starting to work on it again and I added 15 pages over last 10 days or so. Then I just noticed that those new pages are not indexed and last time Googlbot visited the site was mid October (more than a month ago).
I used some pinging services but it has not worked yet.

I'm not worried or anything (at this point) but just want to know how soon I should expect Googlebot to come back (how long they visit a dormant site?), and maybe when I should start wondering if there is any reason that keeps it from visiting the site to crawl.

Thanks!
#dormant #googlebot #site #visit
  • Profile picture of the author Tariqsal
    Last time I heard, google does not determine how fast it should index your site based on the amount of content, but based on how authoritative the site is.

    And if google has not indexed your site after 10 days, that smells like you are in trouble. Check to see if you have duplicate content and/or if your traffic has dropped significantly.
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    • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
      Originally Posted by Tariqsal View Post

      Last time I heard, google does not determine how fast it should index your site based on the amount of content, but based on how authoritative the site is.
      Half truth, wrong terminology, over simplified...

      Googlebot's primary job is to find content. Site's that have a lot of content produced on them will often have Googlebot visiting at just short of a denial of service frequency - even sites with fewer links (which is where authority comes from, which is why I said wrong terminology.)

      Anyways, if you take a site that's been siting forever and start milling out content that doesn't trip a filter (dup, legibility, etc) you will see your visit rate quickly elevate in most cases. It normally takes 3-4 weeks to get the ball rolling at if sustained, it will continue to increase.

      That having been said, "Authority" (really links) are a major factor - and the most important in many cases.

      As previously mentioned, Googlebot's job being to discover content is constantly jumping links, so if you have a lot of links pointing at a site Googlebot will obviously visit frequently as it makes those connections through the links.

      That having been said, links aren't the be all end in in some cases. When Googlebot ID's and travels across the link it will check the server header code for a 304 (not modified) and will more often than not close the header connection at that point, not visiting the actual page.

      That having been said, if you have no resource and bandwidth concerns, you can use crawler efficiency against Googlebot if your goal is to increase bot frequency but... I'm not going into that. Google it.
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  • Profile picture of the author avalon2013
    Try to drive the bot to your site with Twitter or some other SN sites. Just tweet something like "Hey, we've posted a new article, check it out!" and add a link to your site, of course.
    Also it would be nice to create a xml sitemap and add it to Google webmaster tools. If it's a wordpress site, you can use this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator otherwise use this https://www.xml-sitemaps.com
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    How often does Googlebot visit a dormant site?
    Look at the server logs and Google cache dates.

    Index individual page URLs with Fetch as Google inside WMT. Build an xml sitemap add the URL to your robots.txt file & submit both URLs to Fetch as Google & sitemap submit in WMT.

    Build backlinks on strong external webpages for consistent indexing/reindexing on autopilot.

    In other words, tell Google your pages exist.
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