Google significantly changed the crawler documentation, resulting in a higher level of information density and tighter topical coverage
Google has launched a major revamp of its Crawler documentation, shrinking the main overview page and splitting content into three new, more focused pages. Although the changelog downplays the changes there is an entirely new section and basically a rewrite of the entire crawler overview page. The additional pages allows Google to increase the information density of all the crawler pages and improves topical coverage.
What Changed?
Google’s documentation changelog notes two changes but there is actually a lot more.
Here are some of the changes:
Added an updated user agent string for the GoogleProducer crawler
Added content encoding information
Added a new section about technical properties
The technical properties section contains entirely new information that didn’t previously exist. There are no changes to the crawler behavior, but by creating three topically specific pages Google is able to add more information to the crawler overview page while simultaneously making it smaller.
There is additional information about crawling over HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, plus a statement about their goal being to crawl as many pages as possible without impacting the website server.
What Is The Goal Of The Revamp?
The change to the documentation was due to the fact that the overview page had become large. Additional crawler information would make the overview page even larger. A decision was made to break the page into three subtopics so that the specific crawler content could continue to grow and making room for more general information on the overviews page. Spinning off subtopics into their own pages is a brilliant solution to the problem of how best to serve users.
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