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Googlebot

Googlebot is the generic name for Google’s web crawler. Googlebot is the general name for two different types of crawlers: a desktop crawler that simulates a user on the desktop, and a mobile crawler that simulates a user on a mobile device. If your site has been converted to mobile-first on Google, then the majority of Googlebot crawl requests will be made using the mobile crawler, and a minority using the desktop crawler.

For sites that haven’t yet been converted, the majority of crawls will be made using the desktop crawler. In both cases, the minority crawler crawls only URLs that have already been crawled by the majority crawler.

How Googlebot accesses the websites?

For most sites, Googlebot shouldn’t access your site more than once every few seconds on average. However, due to delays, it’s possible that the rate will appear to be slightly higher over short periods.

Googlebot was designed to be run simultaneously by thousands of machines to improve performance and scale as the web grows. Also, to cut down on bandwidth usage, we run many crawlers on machines located near the sites that they might crawl. Therefore, your logs may show visits from several machines at google.com, all with the user-agent Googlebot. The goal is to crawl as many pages from your site as we can on each visit without overwhelming your server’s bandwidth.

How to block Googlebot from visiting your site?

It’s almost impossible to keep a web server secret by not publishing links to it. For example, as soon as someone follows a link from your “secret” server to another web server, your “secret” URL may appear in the referrer tag and can be stored and published by the other web server in its referrer log. Similarly, the web has many outdated and broken links. Whenever someone publishes an incorrect link to your site or fails to update links to reflect changes in your server, Googlebot will try to crawl an incorrect link from your site.

If you want to prevent Googlebot from crawling content on your site, you have a number of options. Be aware of the difference between preventing Googlebot from crawling a page, preventing Googlebot from indexing a page, and preventing a page from being accessible at all by both crawlers or users.

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