Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google is perhaps throttling, holding back on, crawling sites fully during the coronavirus outbreak. In short, John said no – but he said if your server cannot handle the Google load, Google will slow down crawling – but that is not any new behavior from Google.

John’s first response to the question was a joke:

Computers are unaffected by this virus, which is kind of funny.

But then he responded saying “I honestly don’t expect much change overall. For some sites, we’ll crawl less frequently because they’re a bit more overloaded, others we might crawl more frequently. This kind of shift happens from time to time (holiday shopping, summer breaks, elections, etc.).”

So I wouldn’t expect Google to crawl less simply because of this COVID-19 outbreak.

Forum discussion at Twitter.