What determines the pages crawled per day graph in Google webmaster tools? It shows that It has a maximum of 2701 pages. However, the maximum number of pages on my website is not more than 300. How can this be possible? How to explain the spike on the graph (from 100 to 2700) without any actual change in site structure or increase in the number of pages?
I dont have a definitive resource as an answer but from my own personal experience this happens if you tell google to crawl your pages manually by say fetching as google or submitting all of your pages to index "including linked pages" so if you have 300 pages and several of those pages have links to all 300 google might crawl all of them a couple times over. Again no expert on the matter just what seems to happen with my sites.
What I ended up guessing is that Google considers the time taken for crawling a page and extrapolate it, to look at the maximum number of pages it could have crawled within that time limit.
On instances where my page is incredibly fast, the values go up and on other days, it comes down.
We have to make sure Google crawl just HTML pages and avoid spend its crawl budget. Some platforms like WordPress create single pages per image and other files.
Also, make sure Google is not crawling URL parameters.
I hope this help. Enrique
It must be related with your sitemap sending a lot of information to Google. For example: page numbers, tags, categories, attachments. Give a check in your sitemap.xml and send only necessary info to Google.
