I’ve been trying to understand what actually makes Google come back to a page more frequently. Some pages seem to get revisited often even without many backlinks, while others don’t seem to get picked up as quickly. From your experience, what usually influences crawl frequency the most?
Update and verify all <lastmod> dates in your sitemap (research best practices first), as it may influence crawling. Google uses accurate <lastmod> values as a hint for re-crawl priority. But... it also strongly bases crawl frequency on your internal linking structure. From my experience, search engines don't care much about your sitemap. They’ll scan it however their algorithms dictate.
Wow, that’s cool, I never thought of it like that before. I have been thinking mainly about internal linking too, though I had no idea about the value that the lastmod still carried in terms of importance by Google. Can internal linking help re-crawl faster, or does it depend on overall site activity?
Hey. I thought this method no longer worked. Care to give me a hint on how to do it if I'm using rankmath or should I just remove it's sitemap settings and go for something else ? Thanks in advance for your answer.
Well, Google comes back more often when a page is easy to crawl, linked well (I think we all agree here), updated, and sitting on a healthy site. Basically, if a page is slow, duplicated, rarely updated, or surrounded by lots of low-value URLs, Google has less reason to revisit it quickly. Also, more crawling doesn't automatically mean better rankings, because Google says crawling is needed to appear in Search, but remember that crawl rate itself is not a ranking factor.
Google crawls pages more often when they have high authority, frequent content updates, and fast, reliable server performance.
Good question — crawl frequency usually comes down to a mix of authority, freshness, and internal linking. Pages that are updated regularly, receive consistent traffic, and are well-linked internally tend to get crawled more often. Strong external backlinks can also increase crawl priority because Google sees the page as more important in the overall web graph. In practice, keeping content fresh, improving site structure, and earning relevant links are still the most reliable ways to influence crawl behavior over time.
From my experience, crawl frequency mostly depends on content freshness and the overall depth of your site's architecture. If a page or category is updated regularly or sits close to the homepage, Google bots will naturally visit it much more often than deeper, static pages.
Worth reframing the whole thing: crawl frequency is Googlebot running a cost-benefit calc per URL, basically how likely a re-crawl is to find a change worth re-indexing. Freshness, links, and authority all feed that calc, but the signal people miss is whether your past edits changed the indexed main content. If you keep bumping a page and Google re-crawls to find the body unchanged, just a new date, a reshuffled sidebar, a swapped widget, it learns your updates are noise and backs off. That is also why the lastmod tip cuts both ways: bump lastmod without a real content change a few times and Google starts ignoring your lastmod entirely. Instead of guessing, look at the data directly. The Crawl Stats report in Search Console (Settings, then Crawl stats) and your raw server access logs show crawl hits by URL and by directory. Almost every site I have pulled logs for shows the same pattern: Google over-crawls low-value faceted, paginated, and parameter URLs and under-crawls the pages that make money. That is a crawl-budget redistribution problem, not a post-more-often problem. The fix is canonical, noindex, and robots rules on the junk plus tighter internal links pointing at the money pages, which is where qwikad and Liam_Archer are already pointing. One caveat: if this is a small site, a few thousand URLs or fewer, crawl budget is effectively a non-issue and you would be optimizing something that does not constrain you. There the real question is indexing quality, whether good pages get and keep their index slot, not raw crawl rate.