Crawl rate dropped to zero

[pok3rplay3r]

Hello, I recently moved my site in godaddy from cpanel to managed wordpress. I bought this transfer directly from GoDaddy customer service. in this process they accidentally changed my domain from www to non www. I changed it back after the migration, but as a result of this sites craw rate from search console fell to zero and has not risen at all since then.

In addition to this website does not display any other errors, i can ask google manually fetch my pages and it works as before, only the crawl rates seems to be dropped permanently. GoDaddy customer service also claims that do not see any errors but I think, however, that in some way they caused this during the migration when the url changed since the timing match perfectly.  also when they accidentally removed the www, crawl rate of my sites  non www version got up but fell back to zero when I changed it back to www version. Now the crawl rate of both www and non www version is zero. How do I get it to rise again? Customer service also said that the problem may be related to ftp-data of search console?  But they were not able to help any more than .Would someone from here be able to help me with this in anyway please?

[pok3rplay3r]

Hi, my robot.txt file looks like this:

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 1
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-admin/

This is not how it suppose to look like, right? could this cause the problem?

[4RS_John]

That's not so horrible - it just says not to crawl the plugins directory or the admin, and to delay a second between requests. You probably don't want your plugins or admin directories being indexed, and according to this old forum post Google ignores the crawl-delay directive, so the robots.txt isn't the problem.

[4RS_John]

I don't know why this is happening, but this is what I would check:

• Do you see any crawl errors in the Google Search Console?
• If you search for your site on Google, what do you see, (does your snippet look normal)?
• How many pages does Google say it has indexed? Is it possible it's indexed everything and is taking a break, (does it even do that?)

One theory is: When you moved to the non-www version of the site, Google started getting 301s redirecting it from www to non-www, and now that you've gone back to www it's getting 301s redirecting it from from non-www to www, so it's got a circular redirect.

Here's what I would do to try to kick-start indexing, if you haven't already:

• Make sure you have the "Preferred Domain" set to the www version of your site in both the www and non-www versions of your site in Google Search Console.
• In the Search Console for the www-version of your site, re-submit your sitemap.
• In the Search Console for the www-version of your site, do a Fetch as Google on your homepage, and maybe a couple of other pages, and when the Fetch is done use the option to submit those pages for indexing, (there's a monthly limit on how much of this you can do).

Good luck!

[pok3rplay3r]

Thank you for your answer, my answers bolded here below

• Do you see any crawl errors in the Google Search Console?  **Nothing new after the crawl rate dropped, just some old soft 404 errors and old not found errors. **
• If you search for your site on Google, what do you see, (does your snippet look normal)? Yes everything looks perfectly normal, just like before when the crawl rate dropped
• How many pages does Google say it has indexed? Is it possible it's indexed everything and is taking a break, (does it even do that?) I dont thin this is possible, since the cralw rate dropped lmost instantly from average 400 to zero after the site migration.

One theory is: When you moved to the non-www version of the site, Google started getting 301s redirecting it from www to non-www, and now that you've gone back to www it's getting 301s redirecting it from from non-www to www, so it's got a circular redirect. If this is the problem, how should i start to get it fixed?

Here's what I would do to try to kick-start indexing, if you haven't already:

• Make sure you have the "Preferred Domain" set to the www version of your site in_ both the www and non-www versions of your site_ in Google Search Console. Yes that is how it has been all the time
• In the Search Console for the www-version of your site, re-submit your sitemap. Done
• In the Search Console for the www-version of your site, do a Fetch as Google on your homepage, and maybe a couple of other pages, and when the Fetch is done use the option to submit those pages for indexing, (there's a monthly limit on how much of this you can do). I have done this many times since i noticed the problem, fetch as google works normally without any issues

Is there anything more i can do? If i want hire someone to fix this, is there any recommendations? I am not a tech guy so this is quite difficult task for me

[pok3rplay3r]

Hi, one more thing. Are you 100% sure tht robot.txt file hs nothing to do with this? It changed at the sime time when the problems started to occur. It used to be :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

But now it is :

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 1
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-admin/

At the sime time "blocked resources" notifications started to occur in search console.

Blocked Resources >  Rendering without certain resources can impair the indexing of your web pages. Learn more.Status: 3/19/16152 Pages with blocked resources

This has to have something to do with it right?

[4RS_John]

I'm not convinced that robots.txt is causing your problem, but it can't hurt to change it back. In fact, while looking for instructions on how to change it I came across this blog post by Joost de Valk, (aka Yoast), that pretty much says you should remove everything that's currently in your robots.txt - and his arguments are right for everything:

• Blocking wp-content/plugins will stop Google from loading JS and/or CSS resources that it might need to render the page properly.
• Blocking wp-admin is redundant, because the wp-admin if it's linked it can still be found, and important pages already have an X-Robots HTTP header that says not to index them.

If you're using Yoast SEO, here are instructions on how to change the robots.txt file.

[4RS_John]

I thought of one other possibility: Your sitemap.xml is probably auto-generated, so this shouldn't be a problem, but check to make sure that the URLs in the sitemap.xml have the www.

Other than that I'm out of ideas - I would wait a few days to see what happens, but maybe someone else with more experience watching Google will have seen this before. If it does resolve, I'd like to know what worked.

[pok3rplay3r]

Thanks! I will try that. I see that search console shows crawl rates with few days delay, is there somewhere i could check if it works instantly?

[4RS_John]

Not that I'm aware of, unfortunately. Patience is an important skill when dealing with Google

[pok3rplay3r]

Crawl rate still is extremely slow, average 10-15 per day except when i sent pages to be manually crawled, then it crawls those page. Before the drop the crawl rate was never under 200 per day and it was usually over 1000. anything more I can do? It seems to have no effect my rankings or anything else as l can see, but I still would like this be fixed. It has be something to do with the fact that i changed my hosting to godaddy managed wordpress hosting. but they have no clue about what could cause this. robot.txt file change seemed to have no effect or very minimum effect

[4RS_John]

Interesting. I have 2 more thoughts:

• At this rate, how long would it take Google to crawl all of your pages, (maybe it feels 10-15 is fast enough)?
• Has the average response time increased? If so, maybe Google feels it's overloading the server & backing off.

[pok3rplay3r]

Hello, asnwers to the questions bolded:

• At this rate, how long would it take Google to crawl all of your pages, (maybe it feels 10-15 is fast enough)? Over 50 days, i still cannot believe that it would be just a coincidence that crawl rate dropped so suddenly only because google suddenly thinks that my page should not be crawled that often. After all, amount of new content, quality of new links and all the other factors are much better all the time on my site, and before the drop, crawl rate increased steadily. It has to be some technical issue?
• Has the average response time increased? If so, maybe Google feels it's overloading the server & backing off. No, it has actually went down a little bit (not much though)