Massive drop off in Google crawl stats

[daedriccarl]

Hi

Could i get a second opinion on the following please. ON a client site we seem to have had a massive drop off in google crawling in the past few weeks, this is linked with a drop in search impressions and a slight reduction in penalty. There are no warning messages in WMT to say the site is in trouble, and it shouldn't be, however cannot get to the bottom of what is going on.

In Feb the Kilobytes downloaded per day was between 2200 and about 3800, all good there. However in the past couple of weeks it has peaked at 62 and most days are not even over 3! Something odd has taken place.

For the same period, the Pages crawled per day has gone from 50 - 100 down to under 3.

At the same time the site speed hasn't changed - it is slow and has always been slow (have advised the client to change this but you know how it is....) Unfortunately I am unable to give the site url out so i understand that may impact on any advice people could offer.

Ive attached some screen shots from WMT below.

Many thanks for any assistance.

stats.png

[Keszi]

Hi Carl,

What I'd try to do, is to make some crawls via Screaming Frog to the website, try to analyze how your content is crawled, what could have gone wrong.

Also try to keep a timeline of implementations on the website. (I work at a quite big website, and keeping everything organized for myself helps me analyze issues as yours. I will try to make a copy of my excel timeline and post it here in the following days, if you'd like to )

Another thing that you could do, is to fetch and render the pages. Check for anything out of the ordinary.

These are a few ideas of where I would start digging.

I hope it helps. Keszi

[daedriccarl]

Thanks, will give screaming frog a go. I own the tool but rarely seem to use it. Hopefully that finds out what is amiss.

[Keszi]

I use it on daily basis, because it gives me quite a good image of what we might miss with manual checking. I hope it will do the trick for you too.

BTW: good to know article for Screaming Frog: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide/

That article might speed up things for you and Screaming Frog (for future use )