In February we reported that Google said it is a myth to believe that crawl rate spikes are early signs of an upcoming algorithm update. Gary Illyes from Google told us it was a myth.

So it came up again, this time it was in Google Hangout on Google+ yesterday with John Mueller who said the same thing. But when I prodded a bit, and it isn’t so clear.

I asked at the 20:44 mark:

John Mueller said:

It is interesting to watch, so here is the video embed:

So maybe a crawl spike can somewhat mean something is coming, at least on a site by site basis?

Forum discussion at Google+.

Update: John Mueller added some fun commentary on Google+ about this.