If you have a website that doesn’t change or update content frequently, you may have noticed that Google tends to not crawl those pages as frequently as it does other sites.  But does this lower crawl frequency translate into lower rankings?

The question came up in today’s Google Webmaster Hangout.

Is it true that if a page hasn’t been crawled recently it wont rank well or be given less authority?

It’s not true that if a page isn’t crawled regularly that it won’t show up in rankings at all.  In general we try to do our crawling based on when we think this page might be changing or how often it might be changing.  So if we think that something stays the same for a longer period of time, we might not crawl it for a couple of months.  And that’s completely fine.  We can still show it in search.  So that’s not something that I’d say is a direct relationship.

Oftentimes there is the kind of relationship where that when we think something is important we tend to crawl it more frequently and that might also be more visible in search, it’s not really the case where you could say from the amount of crawling this means how important it will show in search.

He was also asked about whether there was any advantage to resubmitting the sitemap on a regular basis to encourage crawling.  But Mueller says that there is no need to resubmit the sitemap file if you aren’t making any changes.