Metashit

situated behind or beyond shit, transcending shit

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Is Googlebot Indexing Your Site Too Rapidly?

For most of us, search engine robots such as Googlebot indexing our site TOO quickly is not a problem. But what if your domain has 50,000 pages and your webserver cannot handle requests as quickly as Googlebot demands? Well, here are a few solutions:

  1. Add the following code to your robots.txt file, which instructs robots to wait 5 seconds between each request (the default is 1 second):

    User-agent: *
    Crawl-delay: 5

  2. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and change the crawl rate to slower.

    crawl-delay.jpg

  3. As a last resort, you can block robots altogether. This is not recommended since you will not be indexed, but it may be necessary if your webserver cannot handle the bandwidth:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /

Hopefully this will not even be an issue if you are using a good webhost. I recommend getting a dedicated server from Dreamhost.

posted by admin at 3:48 pm  

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