Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have decent pagerank 4.0. It used to be 5.0 but when Google did rollbacks a while back, it became a 4.0 and there it has stayed.
I get pretty good rankings for Blue Widgits My City an other similar terms. No matter what I do, I have never been able to rank for "Blue Widgits". I see other sites that aren't even relevant to "Blue Widgits" climbing the ranknigs but I just have not been able to do it.
The other day I logged into my Webmaster Tools and I noticed this:
"Your site has been assigned special crawl rate settings. You will not be able to change the crawl rate."
One of my pages had fallen to more than 100 for "Blue Widgits" and it used to be at about 21. Today it has bounced to position 14 for "Blue widgits". It is in the number 4 position for "Blue Widgets My City" and one of my other pages is in the number 5 position for the same term.
I am totally confused. What is going on?
If you read the thread Google.com SERP Changes - Jun 2009 [webmasterworld.com], you'll see that others experiencing some strange ups and downs at the moment, and no one has the official word on it.
If you just bounced up to higher postion (21 -> 100 -> 14), it may be a test to see if your site is pleasing to the users at a higher level. Nothing you describe sounds like a penalty.
Are you watching your traffic and your server logs - not just ranking?
What does this mean though?
"Your site has been assigned special crawl rate settings. You will not be able to change the crawl rate."
Our goal is to crawl as many pages from your site as we can on each visit without overwhelming your server's bandwidth. You can change the crawl rate (the time used by Googlebot to crawl the site) for sites that are at the root level.
In some cases (apparently yours) Google has tested the server and the site's indexing needs, and they won't allow the owner to experiment with any custom changes.
