Googlebot crawling at slower rate because of SOPA protests

Google developer Pierre Far has revealed that the company has set Googlebot to crawl the web at a slower rate today so that the online services participating in SOPA protests are not affected.

Tons of websites around the world have blacked out their pages in support of the protests and this means that they could lose out on search engine indexing. This could hurt their traffic in the coming days.

Google developers recently posted about what steps can be taken to ensure that their search rankings are not hurt. But still, not everyone is likely to be following the proper procedure.

It is a good decision by the company to limit the indexing speeds of their search crawlers so that the search results are not affected much.