Did you notice that your visits from GoogleBot, Google’s web crawler, slowed to virtually almost nothing yesterday? The reason for that was because of the SOPA protests and Google slowed GoogleBot activity in order not to hurt those sites in their search results.
There are several threads where webmasters claim GoogleBot didn’t crawl their sites at all yesterday. Google said they “slowed” the crawling behavior of GoogleBot but I guess in some cases, they stopped crawling for some sites completely. You have to assume they continued to crawl news sites?
A Google Webmaster Help thread and WebmasterWorld thread have webmasters and SEOs claiming they saw zero GoogleBot activity on their sites at all.
One webmaster said:
Another said:
In response, Google’s Pierre Far explained again:
In any event, things should be back to normal today.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld.
Image credit to ShutterStock for robot turtle.
