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Do you live outside of the U.S. and wish that Google would crawl your site’s pages? Well, your wish has just come true, kind of. This is all news to us too but this surprise started with an announcement by a Google representative.
Where Is Google Crawling Then?
Search Engine Roundtable reports that a Google representative named Gary Illyes announced that Googlebot could now crawl outside of the United States. Googlebot is the title used to refer to Google’s web crawler which is used on desktop sites and mobile sites.
Illyes states that the “system to handle this is currently live but may not be used in all cases or it may not be used at all for your site,” Search Engine Roundtable reports. However, after he read reports stating that he had made claims crawling was currently happening outside of the United States, he clarifies his claim.
Especially, since in the past Google has said that crawling outside the United States wouldn’t prove to be as useful as one would think. That can be seen in the video hangout just below.
Gary Illyes says that he was discussing Google’s crawling abilities outside of the Unites States. Specifically, in reference to the IP block that have been assigned to countries which could be used in the future for crawling externally.
Twitter Chatter
Others have spoken on the matter of Googlebot crawling outside of the United States. Webmaster and Google Products Expert Kenichi Suzuki took to Twitter to explain the claim. Here’s what he had to say about the matter.
Googlebot can crawl from a country where the server is located (i.e. from outside US). The system has already gone live but may not be used (at all). In addition, it becomes effective only in a condition where access from outside of the country is blocked. #SearchCentralLive https://t.co/1hPl67NPw8 — Kenichi Suzuki🇺🇦鈴木謙一 (@suzukik) November 24, 2022
For now it seems like Googlebot is going to stay crawling in the Unites States and external crawling might be tabled for now. Keep an eye on Twitter feeds and Webmaster world for more word in the future!
