Google has fixed a crawling issue that was potentially affecting crawl rates for Shopify websites
Users have been complaining about their Shopify websites’ crawl frequency being significantly lower than normal over the last few days. The crawl rate, according to some, had dropped. Some users complained that their new pages were not indexed for a couple of weeks.
Hey @JohnMu is there any current issues with google bot?
I have noticed on 4 Shopify stores that we manage all crawl requests have flatlined.
We have 2 wordpress based websites that we manage and they have crawl data as normal. Any insight anyone? @rustybrick @Kevin_Indig pic.twitter.com/SBGuqQjuir— Tim Dennis (@tim_fully) January 30, 2022
Hey @JohnMu is there a known issue with Google being unable to crawl Shopify sites at the min? Three clients have had their crawls flatlined since the 25th pic.twitter.com/7q5OskAZef
— Jess (@JessicaMal_) February 4, 2022
Google’s John Mueller acknowledged that there were some issues with crawling which have now been fixed. He also mentioned that the issue was not specific to Shopify websites.
“We looked into the sites that were mentioned and for all of them it was a temporary drop in how we calculate how much we can crawl. This happens from time to time, and catches up after a few days usually”, said John.
As far as the engineers are concerned, these are in a good state, crawling will speed up again, and there's not something that needs to be done. It's kinda confusing from the outside though 🙂
— johnmu is not a chatbot yet 🐀 (@JohnMu) February 7, 2022
Jackson Lo, the Sr. SEO Lead at Shopify, was quick to thank John Mueller and the Google Search Console (GSC) team for taking prompt action and fixing the issue.
Thank you John + GSC team for investigating this 🙏
— Jackson Lo ⚡️ (@jackson_lo) February 7, 2022
Dips in crawl rates can be troublesome and worrying. If you have experienced crawling issues during the past week, we encourage you to keep a close eye on Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report. We believe that the crawl frequency should be back to normal in a couple of days.
