Have you ever wondered what would happen if you stopped Google from crawling your website for a few weeks? SEO technical expert Kristina Azarenko has published the results of this experiment.
Six surprising things that happened. What happened when Googlebot failed to crawl Azarenko’s site from October 5 to November 7:
Removed favicon from Google Search results. The video search results were very successful and have not yet recovered after the experiment. Positions remained relatively stable, except that they were slightly more volatile in Canada. Traffic experienced only a slight decrease. An increase in indexed pages reported in Google Search Console. Because? Pages with robots noindex meta tags ended up being indexed because Google couldn’t crawl the site to see those tags. Multiple alerts in GSC (eg “Indexed but blocked by robots.txt”, “Blocked by robots.txt”).
Why we care Testing is a crucial element of SEO. All changes (intentional or unintentional) can affect your rankings, traffic and results, so it’s good to understand how Google might react. Also, most companies can’t run this kind of experiment, so this is good information to know.
the experiment You can read it all at Unexpected results from my Google crawl experiment.
Another similar experiment. Ahrefs’ Patrick Stox also shared the results of blocking two high-ranking pages with robots.txt for five months. The impact on rankings was minimal, but the pages lost all their featured snippets.
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About the author
Danny Goodwin has been the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land & Search Marketing Expo – SMX since 2022. He joined Search Engine Land in 2022 as a senior editor. In addition to reporting on the latest search marketing news, he manages Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Expert (SME) program. Also helps schedule US SMX events.
Goodwin has been editing and writing about the latest developments and trends in search and digital marketing since 2007. He was previously executive editor of Search Engine Journal (2017-2022), editor-in-chief of Momentology (2014-2016), and editor from Search. Engine Watch (from 2007 to 2014). He has spoken at numerous major search conferences and virtual events, and has brought his expertise to bear in a wide range of publications and podcasts.
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