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In one of the previous newsletter issues I was talking about how Google cares only about “cheap” websites - websites that don’t waste Google money.

By cheap, I meant:

Now it is time to put my money where my mouth is in one of those areas - Cheap Crawling and Indexation.

I have worked with a large e-commerce site for the last couple of years now - 500k+ products. I learned that Google was limiting the crawling of its pages. The reason was the high average response time from the server - around 1,5 seconds for every page/resource. HTML pages themselves were

The crawling was also limited - Google was crawling only around 20,000 - 30,000 pages daily, which is not the worst, but ideally I want Google to crawl every page every day multiple times - I am a masochist.

My train of thought was:

Optimize server performance → Optimize crawling and indexation → Improve Traffic

And I was right.

What we did:

We saw the first results literally next week after those changes. The Time To First Byte was now Good for over 90% of users. The Average response time went from 1600ms to even around 400ms to all pages/resources - 75% reduction in Average response Time. I am cooking here.

Bonus: the loading performance on the site became literally instant so by doing server optimization, we also improved user experience and conversion rates. Win-win.

The crawling improved by around 300%. Google was now crawling around 120,000-150,000 pages every day.

Google was now crawling and indexing 3-4x the number of pages every day. New products started appearing in search and gathering traffic. The cost of retrieving the information from the site dropped significantly → we saved Google money and started winning

The title of this newsletter wasn’t clickbait. With this server optimization (+ one more pretty nice change, I will talk about it another time), we improved the site’s traffic from 17k daily clicks to over 23k% daily clicks → 33% increase

This is your reminder to take a step back in your SEO strategies. You can create tons of new content, add new pages, build links, but at the end of the day, Google cares about money.

Optimizing the server performance is literally like optimizing the bread on the sandwich. It makes all the difference and improves the overall experience.

Do you take a step back in your SEO projects? I think it’s time to do that.

Reply “Crawling Win” and your domain, and I’ll show you the exact crawling fixes needed on your site.

I use them for my e-commerce clients every day.

Here I audited Displate - a global metal posters brand that you probably saw sponsoring your favorite YouTuber.

Link to the Watch Video

🔎 Optimize Time To First Byte
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