Seeing that  , right now there are a lot of websites going dark in order to protest SOPA as well as PIPA. Google supplies   blackout SEO assistance however they made the decision to take this one step further simply by slowing down their spiders right now.

Pierre Far at Google published on his Google+ that Google is actually reducing  GoogleBot’s crawl activity to be able to decrease the impact upon their site’s  search positions, if these people did not stick to the Google SEO suggestions from yesterday.

 

Pierre Far :

Hello webmasters! We realize many webmasters are concerned about the medium-term effects of today’s blackout. As a precaution, the crawl team at Google has configured Googlebot to crawl at a much lower rate for today only so that the Google results of websites participating in the blackout are less likely to be affected.