If you’d noticed, there was this option on Google Webmasters earlier to control Google’s crawl rate on your website. You could decrease or increase the crawl rate but most probably you had the “Increase Crawl Rate” option disabled. But no more, Google Webmasters has introduced an advanced setting that lets you alter crawl rate on your website. You can now increase or decrease the Google’s crawl rate the way you want.
Remember, increased crawl rate won’t make Google Bot come to your website more frequently. Crawl rate actually determines the time used by Google Bot to crawl your site on each visit. So, increased crawl rate would ensure that Google Bot would thoroughly go through your website on every visit rather than increasing the frequency of the crawls. It’s a good idea in most of the cases to increase your crawl rate by a certain amount than the default recommended value. However there might be cases when a user would want to use this option to decrease the crawl rate, specially when Google’s crawl is sucking up a considerable bandwidth and slowing down the server. If this is the case, a better option would be to move your files to a better server than decreasing the crawl rate.
For changing the crawl rate, you need to login to Google Webmasters, select the website you want to alter the crawl rate for, then go to Settings. You will see a setting called Crawl rate towards the bottom of the page. Now, select the option “Set custom crawl rate”. You will then see a slider, move the slider whichever side you want.
Remember, if you do set a custom crawl rate, the new rate will be in effect for 90 days after which it resets to Google’s recommended value.
