Is there crawl-delay on SiteGround servers?

Crawl delay, a less-explored yet valuable aspect of SEO, plays a significant role in optimizing your website’s performance. In this article, we’ll dive into the world of crawl delay, understand its importance, and how it can positively impact your website’s SEO strategy.

What is Crawl Delay?

Crawl delay refers to the deliberate slowing down of search engine bots’ crawling speed when they access your website. While not an officially recognized directive in the robots.txt file, it’s a technique used to regulate the rate at which search engine crawlers interact with your site.

The Purpose of Crawl Delay

Crawl-delay serves a crucial purpose:

1. Server Load Management: Websites with limited server resources or shared hosting plans often face challenges when search engine bots inundate their servers with requests. Crawl-delay helps in managing server load effectively.

Implementing Crawl Delay

Implementing crawl delay is straightforward:

The default crawl delay set on our servers is 10 seconds for all user agents. You can overwrite this value by creating a new file named robots.txt in the document root folder of your website and adding the following lines in it:

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10

Replace the value of the crawl-delay with the desired value. The minimum value for Crawl-delay is set to 1.

How Google Interprets Crawl Delay

Understanding how Google interprets crawl delay is essential:

1. Google’s Approach: Google does not officially support the crawl-delay directive as specified in the robots.txt file. Instead, it uses its own algorithms to manage crawling rates based on various factors, including a website’s server performance.
   You may see a warning in your Google Search Console that there is a crawl-delay directive set for your website. You can safely ignore that warning as Google does not follow the directive in the robots.txt file as explained above.

2. Respect for Website Resources: While Google doesn’t follow crawl-delay directives explicitly, it does respect a website’s resources. If Googlebot detects that crawling is causing server issues, it may automatically slow down its crawling rate to avoid overloading the server.

When to Use Crawl Delay

Crawl-delay is particularly beneficial in the following scenarios:

1. Limited Resources: If your website has limited server resources, crawl delay can prevent server overload.
2. Shared Hosting: Websites on shared hosting plans can use crawl delay to ensure their site’s performance isn’t affected by excessive crawling.

Monitoring and Testing

It’s essential to regularly monitor server performance when using crawl delay. You may need to adjust the delay value based on your website’s needs.