What is crawl delay and crawl delay in robots file

robots.txt

What is robots.txt ?

A robots.txt file instructs search engine crawlers on which URLs on your site they may access. This is primarily used to prevent your site from becoming overburdened with requests; it is not a mechanism for keeping a website out of Google’s index.

What is a robots.txt file used for?

A robots.txt file is used primarily to manage crawler traffic to your site, and usually to keep a file off Google, depending on the file type: Web page, Media file, Resource file.

what is crawl delay?

Crawl delay directive means you can make the search engines wait ten seconds before crawling the site or ten seconds before re-accessing the site after crawling – it’s basically the same thing, but the search engines do it slightly differently.

When it comes to crawling, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex can be a little overzealous, but they do respond to the crawl-delay directive, which keeps them at bay for a while.

What is a good crawl delay?

By setting a crawl delay of 10 seconds, these search engines will only be able to access 8,640 pages per day. This may appear to be a large number for a small site, but it isn’t. On the other hand, if these search engines generate very little traffic, it’s a good way to save bandwidth.

Google Crawl Delay – Getting Started

The crawl-delay setting is ignored by Google. As a result, there’s no need to be concerned about the impact of such a directive on your Google rankings. You can use it safely to deal with other aggressive search bots. Even though Googlebot crawling is unlikely to cause issues, you can still use the Google Search Console to reduce the crawl rate for Google. Here’s how to set the crawl-rate for the Google bot in a few simple steps.

  1. Go to Google Search Console and sign in.
  • Choose the website for which you want to set the crawl-delay.
  • Choose ‘Site Settings’ from the gear icon located in the top right corner.
  • Look for the ‘Crawl Rate’ option, which has a slider for customising the crawl rate. By default, the rate is set to a recommended value.

why webmasters use Crawl Delay?

Although not every website has a large number of pages, many do, and many of them are linked from the index. As a result, when the bot begins crawling the site, it sends out an excessive number of requests in a short period of time. Such traffic has the potential to deplete hosting resources on an hourly basis.If you’re having trouble with this, you can set the crawl-delay setting to 2-3 seconds to allow the search bot to crawl your site without causing a traffic spike. Crawl-delay can be used on frequently updated social bookmarking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Conclusion: The robots.txt file is a useful tool for controlling how crawlers access your website. The user experience for visitors and the SEO of the website can both benefit from properly creating this file. Bots will be able to organise and display content in the SERPs the way you want it to be displayed if you allow them to spend time crawling the most relevant things. Crawl-delay is a useful directive for controlling aggressive search engine bots and saving server resources for your site and visitors.

Author Bio:

I am Mark Twain, a passionate and experienced content writer in the USA, helping people enhance their Custom Website Design , online presence, website rankings in the SERP and attract more unique visitors by creating fresh, unique & quality content.