How Often Does Google Crawl a Site? + 4 Ways to Improve Crawl Speed

You might be new to blogging and, having written a few pieces of content, may be wondering: how often does Google crawl a site?

In this article, we’ll be covering that very question, including descriptions of what indexing is, how often Google crawls, and what you can do to speed up Google’s indexing of your website.

What Does it Mean When Google Crawls Your Site?

So, what exactly does it mean when Google crawls a website?

Google uses bots, frequently referred to as spiders, to look through a site and store the content, link structure, and information to display in the SERPs later.

Typically, webmasters will use strong interlinking structures and a sitemap to guide these bots.

These bots will creep through every single page on your website, reading through content and sending it to the index to be used later.

What is Indexing in SEO?

Speaking of which, what the heck does indexing in SEO mean?

To put it simply, the index is just the “database” of links and content that Google has crawled. Once the bot has read through your entire website, data gets placed in the index.

From there, since Google has all the data, each page now has the potential to show up on the SERPs.

How Often Does Google Crawl Websites?

So, you might be wondering, does Google crawl every day? How often does Google update search results?

Like most concepts in SEO, the simple truth is that the speed of Google crawling a site varies substantially by a variety of factors.

That being said, Google has publicly stated that sites are typically crawled “every four to thirty days”. On the flip side, however, many SEO experts claim that crawling new sites can take up to half a year or more.

Submitting your sitemap and manually requesting “URL Inspection” in Google Search Console can often speed up this process, but not always. Sometimes the Googlebot is just stubborn and slow.

Crawl Budget

Before we continue on, let’s talk about the concept of a “crawl budget” really quickly.

Although data storage technology has advanced considerably over the last few years, Google still has a limited amount of digital storage space for all its web information. What this means is that Google can’t constantly be crawling every site on the internet because they simply don’t have the hardware to support it.

For this reason, every website is assigned a “crawl budget”. This is roughly based on, according to the Googlebot, how frequently it predicts that your site will have new content.

A website about current events, for example, will get a high (frequent) crawl budget, while a website about the history of Siamese cats, for example, will get a low (infrequent) crawl budget.

How Long Does Google Indexing Take?

Alright, so after Google crawls a webpage, how long does it take to update the search results?

Just like in crawling, there’s no set time as to when your site may show up in the SERPs after being crawled and indexed.

According to Google’s John Mueller, a page can take anywhere from “several hours to several weeks” to show up in the SERPs after being added to the index.

How to Get Google to Crawl Your Site Faster (4 Ways)

Now that you know all the basics about Google’s crawling and indexing ideology, let’s talk about some actionable steps you can take to get Google to crawl and, ultimately, index your site quicker.

1. Make Sure Robots.txt is Set Up

First up, make sure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking Google’s… well, robots.

Robots.txt is a file on every website that pretty much acts as a guide to tell the Googlebot what to crawl. You can go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt to see what yours looks like.

By default, there shouldn’t be any issues, but make sure that nothing (besides your site’s login page or other “back-end” pages) is on the “disallow” line.

Here’s a quick example of a simple and typical robots.txt file for a self-hosted WordPress site.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

2. Submit Your Sitemap

As we mentioned earlier in the article, a sitemap acts as a “tour guide” of sorts, showing the Googlebot all the pages on a website.

If you go through any sort of platform, whether that be WordPress, Squarespace, etc., a sitemap should have been automatically generated for you at: yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.

All you have to do is log into Google Search Console (if you haven’t set up GSC yet, do it), and then copy and paste the sitemap URL into the sitemap tab.

From there, Google should have a much easier time understanding how and where to find and crawl all the pages on your site.

3. Manually Request Indexing

Next, for every new post you publish, use the manual request indexing feature in Google Search Console.

To use it, simply copy and paste your desired page URL into the top of Google Search Console. From there, hit the “Test Live URL” button. This will force Google to test the page immediately for any issues that might prevent indexing. If it comes back clean, hit the “Request Indexing” button.

A manual crawl/index request isn’t guaranteed to make your page rank faster, but it certainly signals to Google, “hey, this page exists!”.

4. Make Sure Your Site is Fast

Finally, make sure your site loads quickly. As stated earlier, Google’s crawler bot has limited bandwidth. If the Googlebot has to wait a while for all your pages to load, it’s going to prioritize other websites first.

Ensure you have a fast host and that your website passes Google’s Pagespeed tests.

Conclusion

So, now that we’ve done all of this, how long will it be until Google indexes your site? Again, there’s no simple answer. Some websites get crawled and indexed within a few hours, while newer sites can wait literal months to see any results.

However, following the aforementioned simple steps (Robots.TXT, sitemap, manually requesting indexing, and insuring quick site speed) is a great way to signal to Google that your site should be placed higher up on the priority list for crawling.

Remember, even with excellent optimization, SEO can often be a waiting game. Patience (and persistence) are key.