As you know, last week, April 26, Google disabled the URL Parameter Tool in Google Search Console and stopped following the rules added to this tool. Some ask if the recent crawl spikes they’ve seen with Googlebot were related to this change.
Dave Smart posted graphs on Twitter showing that his crawl activity increased around this time. Of course, this can easily be unrelated to the URL Parameter Tool. It is almost impossible to isolate this crawl peak to the URL parameter tool. But Dave said there were no other changes at that time.
Here are his tweets:
1/3 Gone, but not forgotten! Now might be a good time to check out what is being explored.
I suspect they deprecated using what was set up here a few days ago, here are the crawl stats for a client’s sitehttps://t.co/FbBvbCWjct pic.twitter.com/yAPhONATGU—Dave Smart (@davewsmart) April 26, 2022
3/3 Judicious use of robots.txt quickly reduced that gbot’s 9 hits per second to 1.5/2 per second, and (many more) those actually valuable URLs. A temporary solution, the site will soon be re-platformed anyway. If your site relied on param tools, keep an eye out.
—Dave Smart (@davewsmart) April 26, 2022
Glenn Gabe chimed in to say it was probably unrelated:
Still a strong possibility, they picked up and started crawling randomly. I am okay! It started to intensify on the 13th, so almost 2 weeks ago, no other real change, but nothing is ever static.
—Dave Smart (@davewsmart) April 26, 2022
And Google’s John Mueller agreed:
That would also be my point of view. The systems also automatically adjust over time, so I would never expect this to be completely static.
— 🦙 johnmu.xml (personal) 🦙 (@JohnMu) April 26, 2022
Of course, anything is possible. I’ve heard from other people privately that they saw significant crawl spikes after the URL parameter tool disappeared – and yes, they used the tool a lot. But again, it’s impossible to confirm without having access to Google’s end.
Have you noticed this too? What do you all think?
Discussion forum on Twitter.
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