Hey I have noticed Google isn't indexing my site up to date as before.I set crawling rate as "recommended" in webmaster tools so Google will crawl depending upon its data. For the last two months I wasn't updating much.Even if I update with new posts,Its not indexing as before in time. Does(crawling rate) it depend of activity of the website?
As for my experience, increasing the crawling a little somewhat helped on indexing our site which increases the number of indexed pages..
Of course it does. Would a googlebot keep on crawling the same website over and over again if it hasn't done anything for the past 12 months?
one important t hing is that changing crawling rate from webmaster tool will not effect much if you will not change anything on your website. If Google bot detects regularly changing content on your website it will automatically change the rate.