Google Assists SOPA Blackout Sites With Slowed Web Crawlers

Today there's one gigantic mass of SOPA and PIPA protests across the web, most of them taking the form of a total blackout of the sites participating – what Google has done to assist in these sites rankings within the search results of their site is to slow down their web crawlers. What this does for you, the blackout protestor, is to affect your page ranking in Google enough that you don't have to worry about having to climb your way back up into the results tomorrow when the blackout is done. Those of you that rely on Google for hits should rejoice and be glad.

GoogleBot's crawl activity has been slowed, this coming in addition to Google's big SEO advice column from yesterday for people who'd back then been preparing for today. As Google's Pierre Far says today, they don't want you to miss out on all that tasty traffic just because you're doing something positive for the web. Far said thusly on his G+ account:

"Hello webmasters! We realize many webmasters are concerned about the medium-term effects of today's blackout. As a precaution, the crawl team at Google has configured Googlebot to crawl at a much lower rate for today only so that the Google results of websites participating in the blackout are less likely to be affected." – Far

So there you go! Take part and take heed! Also check out our timeline of SOPA-related posts to get the full taste of what the SOPA and PIPA bills are and what they mean. Also check out our most recent entry on how R3 Media feels about the bills – thats SlashGear and Android Community's overarching name, if you did not know.

[via Google+]