Google stopped downloading my site

[c41lum]

What does it mean when Kilobytes downloaded per day drops close to zero but the Pages crawled per day remains about the same?

Our site looks like it hasn't had any pages downloaded by Gbot in over 3 weeks.

Its a new re-designed site that has had problems in the past with a Google penalty. We have 301'd old pages to the root and gone with a totally new structure.

Anybody else had this problem.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Is your traffic level the same? If so I wouldn't worry too much about what google does.

[jimbeetle]

Have pages changed? Added new pages?

[encyclo]

We have 301'd old pages to the root and gone with a totally new structure.

You really should avoid such a tactic, it will do nothing but cause problems (as you seem to be experiencing). Even leaving the old pages 404 is better than the current setup. You need to redirect old pages to their new equivalents, never just to the home page.

[tedster]

It sounds like googlebot is taking only the http headers (nearly zero kb) from your old URLs and not spidering the 301 target page.

Googlebot does not act like a browser and immediately go to the new URL - it will when it's good and ready. And since your 301 is always the home page, it probably already has a recent cache of that and no need to check.

It also sounds like googlebot has not begun to crawl your new URLs. As others have mentioned, you would be much better off to 301 on a page by page basis, and if there is no replacement page in the new website, then return a 404. You want googlebot to see and crawl the new site structure, not to keep chewing over the old one.

Remember that a 301 redirect technically says "the requested content is now available at this new address." A 301 is NOT a way of automatically sending all your link juice wherever you would like to see it go, no matter what the content. Approaching the 301 redirect in that way can trigger a loss of trust and hurt your rankings.