0 How often search engines crawl your site

How often search engines crawl your site

A post on the SEOBook.com blog suggests that the date Google last cached a site - that is, crawled and indexed its pages - indicates Google's algorithmic opinion of that website better than the public PageRank number.

To find out when a website's home page was last cached by Google, Yahoo and Bing, search for the website (example: MyWebsite.com) on AboutUs.org. Once you reach the page for that site, click on the "Search Engine Visibility" tab in the left-hand navigation bar.

You can get the most recent data by clicking "Refresh the numbers." If the "date last crawled" is within the past couple of days - or better yet, today - your site is probably doing well with the search engines. If the date last crawled is more than a week ago, search engines may think that your site's content is stale, or less valuable than it could be.

PageRank can help you understand why search engines crawl a certain proportion of the pages on your site. In a March 2010 interview, Matt Cutts said, "There is also not a hard limit on our crawl. The best way to think about it is that the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank."