deadsea - 10:57 am on Apr 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

I monitor several sites with more than ten thousand pages. On all of those sites the GoogleBot crawl rate has dropped by at least 75%. Is this a phenomenon that others are seeing as well.

I am observing this on my own site, and sites run by several others. The sites are not related (different ownership, development teams, link strategies, hosting facilities, etc).

The graphs in Google webmaster tools (site -> tools -> set crawl rate) show that pages and kilobytes per day have dropped drastically, almost to zero in April. The graph of time spent downloading a page has not changed.

Are other people observing this phenomenon too?

[edited by: tedster at 1:50 am (utc) on April 29, 2008]
[edit reason] fix formatting [/edit]