Double Your Google Crawl Rate Almost Immediately [case study]
All evidence shows that your Social Media reach can directly impact your Google crawl rate and SERP position.
The content marketing business is growing bigger everyday. There are lots of agencies out there that will write blogs for people and update their Twitter account, attempting to grow their business and expand their audience. We closely monitored our results for a number of clients to try to find correlations between various actions we took and Google’s responses. Read on to see what we found out!
Controlled For – Content Publishing Rate
Typically, we published content at the rate of around one post per day. The content was a mixture between feature unique content and summary articles commenting on existing content with links to the content at the bottom of the article. We correlated natural variation in publishing rate to the results.
Controlled For – Sharing Links To Content On Twitter
Links were shared on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to the content published in the site. There was daily variation in the number of followers displaying the links based on retweeting and the number of followers at that time.
What Correlated?
1- Number of Tweets/Posts. We found no correlation between the number of tweets and posts to other Social Media platforms and the Google crawl rate or SERP position.
2- Number of Mentions/Interactions. We found no correlation between the number of Twitter and other Social Ineractions and the Google crawl rate or SERP position.
3- Number of Actual Tweets Linking To Our Content. We found no correlation between the number of posts with links to our site content.
4- Number of Followers Displaying Links In Social Media (REACH). We found a correlation here between the number of links showing up in Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin that pointed to the website content we published.
Effects On Crawl Rate and SERP Position
2 Day Delay In Google Crawl Rate
We found that the Google crawl rate responded to the peaks and valleys of our REACH. In other words, a Tweet that got retweeted a few times and happened to reach 2 or 3 times our typical audience size showed up 2 days later as a surge in Google crawl rate of the website with the content.
2 Day Delay In SERP Position
We found that the Google SERP position on a high competition keyword responded to the peaks and valleys of our REACH. In other words, a Tweet that got retweeted a few times and happened to reach 2 or 3 times our typical audience size showed up 2 days later as an increase in SERP position. A drop in tweeting to ZERO showed up as a 3 position drop in SERP position from 2 to 5.
Discussion
Since we added content to the websites on a consistent basis, the increase in Google Crawl rate could essentially be the increased need to crawl the new pages. However, one look at the graphs above will demonstrate that the increase in crawl rate was from 2 to 100 times more than the raw number of pages added to the site. Again this illustrates that the Social Media reach and links to the site caused an overall increase in Google’s “interest” in the website. This resulted in an abundance of crawling and increase in SERP position.