In working with a client today, they asked what were some of the practices to avoid regarding Search administration in SharePoint Server 2007 and Search Server 2008? After discussing these topics for a while, I decided to go ahead and write a quick blog post on them. So, here's four simple things that you *shouldn't* do when the crawler is actively crawling a content source:

1. Perform multiple crawls unless your Index server and networking subsystem can handle the load
2. Reboot the server – even though the crawler will commence when the server comes back up (in most instances), best practice is to stop the crawl services before rebooting
3. Crawl content twice – bad idea. The same content items will appear in the index under two different URLs
4. Delete a content source – this fills the same crawl queue from which the crawler finds its' URLs with the URLs in the index that need to be deleted. Ideally, this queue should be empty when you delete a content source.
5. Put more than 5-8 Federated web parts on the same results page.

Bill English, MVP