Best Practices for Managing Googlebot’s Crawl Rate

Google recently issued a warning against using 4xx HTTP status codes, except for 429, as a means of rate limiting Googlebot’s crawl rate. As per the post, using these HTTP status codes can harm a website’s search engine ranking, and it’s suggested that website owners use other methods instead.

According to Google, the 4xx errors sent to clients are a signal from the server that the client’s request was incorrect in some way. Most of the errors in this category, like “not found” errors and “forbidden,” do not suggest any problem with the server itself. The exception to this is the 429 error, which indicates that the server is receiving too many requests and needs to slow down.

Using 4xx HTTP status codes to limit Googlebot’s crawl rate is not recommended, as it can harm search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. All 4xx HTTP status codes, except for 429, can cause a website’s content to be removed from Google Search. Furthermore, if the robots.txt file is also served with a 4xx HTTP status code, Googlebot will treat it as if it doesn’t exist.

The best way to manage Googlebot’s crawl rate is to use Search Console to temporarily reduce the crawl rate or return a 500, 503, or 429 HTTP status code to Googlebot when it’s crawling too fast. Google has extensive documentation on how to reduce Googlebot’s crawl rate and how different HTTP status codes are handled.

Website owners should avoid using 4xx HTTP status codes, except for 429, as a means of rate limiting Googlebot’s crawl rate. Instead, they should use other recommended methods to manage Googlebot’s crawl rate to avoid harm to their website’s search engine ranking.