Member Avatar for Dani
Dani 5,664 The Queen of DaniWeb

We were recently hit hard by the latest core algorithm update. Since then, we turned off our AMP pages and our crawl rate, which had been rather consistent for the past many months, has been steadily climbing.

Can we draw any conclusions? Is a climbing crawl rate a positive signal that googlebot sees a lot to EAT and therefore is more ambitious about crawling us?

  • 1 Contributor
  • 0 Replies
  • 48 Views

Dani AI

Generated

Short answer, : a rising crawl rate on its own is not a ranking or E-E-A-T signal. Google crawls more when (a) there is higher crawl demand (newly discovered or changed URLs) and/or (b) your host can handle more (fewer errors, faster responses) Google on crawl budget. After a core update and an AMP shutdown, it is common to see a temporary recrawl surge while Google swaps to the canonical HTML, cleans up AMP relationships, and re-evaluates internal links. AMP use is optional on Google Search; removing it does not, by itself, improve rankings . Core updates are about overall content quality and helpfulness, not crawl volume Core updates guidance, People-first content.

To diagnose why crawl is climbing, check Search Console’s Crawl Stats: look at Refresh vs Discovery, status code distribution, host status, and average response time . Also confirm the spike is real Googlebot and see what it is fetching Verify Googlebot.

awk '/Googlebot/ {print $9}' access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

If most of the new crawling is 200 refreshes on canonical HTML while legacy AMP URLs are returning 301/404, the uptick is likely just cleanup and a neutral-to-good sign. Make sure sitemaps have accurate lastmod (avoid mass bumps), remove any rel=amphtml, and redirect legacy AMP to canonicals where possible. Then focus on content and UX improvements aligned with Google’s people-first guidance; those are what help with core update recovery, not the crawl rate itself People-first content.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.