Am I at the mercy if and when google crawls my site again? I have been looking at my stats on google webmaster and it has been 6 days since my site has been crawled. Is there anything I can do to speed up the process of crawling, indexing or whatever you call it? Thanks in advance for any advise!
Well, go Social Bookmarking - for free! This is one of the easiest and the best ways to get your site crawled fast. Submit your sites to Digg, StumbleUpon, Propeller, HubPages etc etc. If you have a blog, or if you have an RSS feed, ping your site. The third way is to add your site's link to your DP signature and start posting in new & popular threads. DP threads are really indexed super-fast. If you apply any of the above three strategies, you're bound to get a bot visit within 24 hours!
No you are not at the mercy of Google's crawler. If you go to webmaster tool, or if you have a sitemap, you can easily tell the crawler how frequently it should visit. if you dont update it everyday, then dont tell it to come everyday, otherwise without fresh content repeated visits may adversely effect you which is very logical in my opinion.
It always comes back to links - the more links you have, the more often Google will visit your site. Updating it regularly helps as well.
Though Crawling rate does not affect the SERP Result , but if you still want to increase your crawl rate you should update your blog on regular basis by adding fresh and unique content as GOOGLE LOVES FRESH AND UNIQUE Content. NOTE : Crawl rate does not affect the SERP Result.
good point, I have sites that are crawled non-stop, every minute and that does not mean they are doing very well on SERP
Another way to increase the rate of visits from googlebot and other crawlers is to constantly add new content. I have tried updating a blog several times daily for testing, and sure enough after a while, googlebot came around a lot more often!
Get lots of backlinks, and if possible, get some from high PR pages. This will help a lot in crawling your site faster.