When is Ms. Googlebot LEAST Active?

You don't wanna be crawled when changing hosting companies.

[Beachboy]

I'd like the members to chime in with their observations on precisely when, during the monthly crawl/update cycle, Googlebot is absent, inactive, asleep, missing, out of town, away at lunch or home sick. In the last two months, what dates of the month hasn't she come around? I have to move a few websites to a new hosting company and I don't want those sites offline for the DNS update when Ms. Googlebot arrives to crawl them. Thanks in advance for your input. :)

[olias]

She seems to stop visiting me altogether for a couple of days before the update begins. As far as I see it, we get an update, about a week later the main monthly crawl begins and continues for about a week then we have a two week period where the most important pages are crawled regularly and some new material may be found (but is not generally deep crawled).

So in answer to your question, I'd say about now would be a good time.

[Marcia]

Some say mid-month between updates is the best time to move.

Here's what WebGuerrilla says about it:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I've got sites that always get visits later than everyone else it seems, and they're done by now, including the one that got lost last month. So I'd agree with Olias.

I moved a section of that site with a 301 and grabbed that in just before the update started, so it should be cool for the coming update, that's how I timed that one.

[taxpod]

I'd say that she is least active from the tenth to about the 23d. But keep in mind that Google does seem to be slow to update the DNS cache so, if you can, leave the old server active until after the following crawl. Watch your logs and when you are convinced that she has updated the cache, kill the old hosting. We ran parallel for almost a month and then killed the old server after the next crawl on one project and everything went pretty smoothly.

[diddlydazz]

Hi Beachboy,

I just moved a few sites, as long as you leave the site up at the old host until Google updates it's DNS cache then it goes smoothly.

I was worried about moving in case googlebot came and subsequently kicked the sites out of the index, but it didn't happen.

I could see Googlebot in the logs from the old host and then when I started seeing her in the new logs (new host) then I removed the pages from the old host.

Because Google caches the DNS and takes normally around 14 days to update the DNS then even if your site has a bit of downtime due to the DNS propagating google will *still* be going to the old host as if nothing has happened, and then, by the time Google updates its DNS cache your site is back up on the new server.

Hope this makes sense ;)

Dazz

(too slow :) )