Back in May we saw some reports that Google was testing this tool and now Vanessa Fox has announced the new crawl rate tools are available in your webmaster tools. Four new tools in all were announced including:

• Googlebot activity report charts

• Number of pages crawled per day
• Number of kilobytes downloaded per day
• Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)

• Crawl rate control

• Faster: A faster crawl will enable us to crawl your site quickly, but may put more load on your server.
• Normal: Recommended rate.
• Slower: A slower rate will reduce Googlebot’s traffic on your server but we may not be able to crawl your site as often.

• Enhanced Image Search

“You can now opt into enhanced image search for the images on your site, which enables our tools such as Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images. After you’ve opted in, you can opt out at any time.”

• Sitemaps Number of URLs submitted & Found

“Access the Sitemaps tab to see the number of URLsSitemapsd in each Sitemap you’ve submitted.”

A couple things I did notice was that the googlebot activity charts do not highlight the individual days and the chart looks cut off about three weeks ago because October is not represented yet and today is Oct 18th.

If you select for googlebot to crawl your site slower it says it “may not be able to crawl your site as often. I wonder how much less often that will be. Also, the Faster option is not always enabled. Maybe if you slow it down you have the option available to speed it back up, but for the site I checked on it was not enabled. If you have the “Faster” option availble on your site it would be interesting to hear from you and what your circumstances are.