Google Spider Penalty, does it exist?

Googlebot on go slow

[grail]

Is there such a thing a respidering penalty where google goes really slow indexing the pages of your site?

It just seems that since december googlebot has been very lethargic on my site.

Having been hit hard mid december by what I presumed was a dup content filter I took the opportunity to completely rehash my site. I made all the changes I had wanted to make but was too scared too while the site was indexed ok. I moved all my unique content up my site and reduced the amount of dup content, shifted hosting to another region, and mod rewrote the links that still looked dynamic and 301 redirected the old pages.

Google has been really slow in taking the pages again. There was a bit of a surge a few days ago but seems slower than I ever remember. Is there such a thing as a spider penalty?

[Roel]

A good idea is to get more links - that always seems to help

[grail]

Googlebot is now full speed ahead on the site now but between mid december and feb was very slow.

Yes agree with you on the links it's possible that the number of backlinks to me fell or rather the number of backlinks google knew about or recognised fell.

I am still wondering about the penalty, perhaps it was just related to the update. Perhaps the penalty doesn't exist but should google kick half your site into the trash it takes it a while to catch on to the size of/pages on your site should you restructure it.

[webdev]

What do you use to monitor the speed of the bot on your site and how many pages it is indexing?

[grail]

I am just using my site stats and my log files and a general feel of how things have gone in the past.

By slow I mean in the number of pages on my site googlebot is taking over a period of time.

Yes perhaps I have confused things with my strange sentence construction. I mean size of the site as a whole not individual page sizes or the speed of taking of individual pages