Google’s John Mueller said again that a spike in crawling activity on your site is unrelated to an upcoming search ranking algorithm update. John Mueller said on Twitter “it’s unrelated” when asked if crawl spikes are related to Google updates.
This came up when I wrote about SEOs noticing a spike in crawling recently. To be fair, I did cover in the bottom of that story that this is likely unrelated to any update that might be coming. I wrote “large crawl rate increases is not related to algorithm updates, although, sometimes it might be – maybe.” Those referenced past times I covered Google’s statements on crawl spikes and how they are unrelated to algorithm updates.
Here is the Twitter thread with John’s confirmation:
Yep. Google seems to recrawl large parts of the index before core updates.
The question is “why?” Maybe to recalculate certain rank-related variables across many sites. Maybe to update its corpus at the same time. Maybe…????????♂️
— Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) January 19, 2022
That’s not really true. Google has explained that’s a myth. It would be due to big site changes causing the spike in crawling and not the upcoming algo update. I haven’t seen any connection there either (based on helping many sites impacted by broad core updates).
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 19, 2022
Yeah, it’s unrelated. I mean, there’s always something launching after a spike in crawling, but there’s also always something launching.
