Has your website crawling reduced in the past few days? Google confirms that there was a bug that slowed down crawling.
Website owners and SEO professionals have been complaining about websites being crawled slowly in recent weeks. Several people have taken to Twitter to express their concerns.
Olivier from seolyzer.io tweeted:
“Googlebot is on strike! Googlebot has drastically reduced its crawl activity on many large sites since November 11 at 6PM (GMT). Are you concerned? It requires a thread!”
🔥 Googlebot is on strike! 😱 Googlebot has drastically reduced its crawl activity on many large sites since November 11 at 6PM (GMT). Are you concerned? It requires a thread! 🔽 pic.twitter.com/ugLmCZbC1O
— Olivier @Seolyzer.io 🚀 (@Seolyzer_io) November 15, 2021
SEO expert Lily Ray also stated that many people have reached out to her regarding the crawling issue:
“Multiple people have reached out to me about this in the last few days… very interesting”
Multiple people have reached out to me about this in the last few days… very interesting. https://t.co/c99GVB7PKp
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) November 17, 2021
Google’s John Mueller has now confirmed that crawling slowed down for some websites between November 11 and November 17, 2021. Google has investigated the issue and discovered a bug that may have caused this.
Here’s what he said:
“Yes, we saw that crawling for the caches had slowed down for some sites. This bug has since been resolved, and an internal analysis showed it wasn’t widespread, and that there were no negative effects overall.”
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1463266021096271882?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1463266021096271882%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpublish.twitter.com%2F%3Fquery%3Dhttps3A2F2Ftwitter.com2FJohnMu2Fstatus2F1463266021096271882widget%3DTweet
Google’s John Mueller also confirmed that the crawling issue was specific to AMP cache.
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1463407623907291139?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1463407623907291139%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpublish.twitter.com%2F%3Fquery%3Dhttps3A2F2Ftwitter.com2FJohnMu2Fstatus2F1463407623907291139widget%3DTweet
If you have experienced delays in crawling or indexing in Google Search, it is likely due to the bug. As Google has confirmed that the bug has been resolved, we advise you to “Request Indexing” for important pages in Google Search Console and wait for them to be indexed.
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