Quick Wins: Increasing Google Crawl By Over 300%

min read

April 27, 2017

In less than a decade, JobiJoba has become one of the leading job search sites in Europe. In fact, since launching in France in 2007, JobiJoba has expanded not just across the European continent, but internationally.JobiJoba sites receive hundreds of thousands of visitors and millions of unique job searches each month. So why were they losing traffic?

Declining Crawl & Losing Traffic

JobiJoba's Enterprise-scale site was a challenge to optimize, but the team had worked hard to boost performance, linking, and other aspects of site structure. Some types of analysis, however, were just too hard to handle without a better tool.Enter, Botify.Over time, Jobijoba could see that Googlebot was crawling fewer and fewer pages per day, and it was negatively impacting their organic traffic. But why?

Uncovering the Root of the Issue

They already knew their site was quite large, and it would be difficult for Google to crawl it all. However, what they found in Botify Analytics was shocking:Nearly 60% of the 10 million URLs analyzed and crawled by Google were Pagination. Onl 7.9% of pages analyzed had even been crawled by Googlebot in the preceding 30 day period. LEss than a single percent of the site was active (receiving SEO visits).

"Without Botify, I never would have seen it."

The good news?There was huge opportunity for SEO growth with a relatively easy answer and a "quick win" in sight.

Quick Wins to Increase Crawl

After uncovering some startling insights, JobiJoba had a serious to-do list to start turning around their crawl and traffic trends. Lucky for them, there were a few quick fixes they could implement to jumpstart improvement.And we do mean quick! After some fast development work, the team put updates in production and saw an increase in search engine crawl the very next day. Crawl volume tripled practically overnight.