Google’s Crawl Rate Slowed for SOPA; Bing Sped Up [VIDEO]

Search giant Google joined in the SOPA protest Wednesday, not just with its blacked-out Doodle, but by agreeing to slow down its crawl rates during the Internet blackout. This meant sites that blacked out their pages wouldn’t suffer in search rankings.

Google said in a Google+ post that it would slow its crawl rate to accommodate sites that wanted to join the protests, and even recommended ways to make sites continue to rank well.

Cloudflare, though, found that Google slowed as much as 60%; Baidu was down 11%, but Bing was up just slightly by 2.35%.

Watch the video above to learn more.

If you took down your site in protest of SOPA and PIPA Wednesday, did you prepare it for the SEO fallout, or were you not concerned about ranking?

Check out a gallery below to see some of the sites that went offline.