Table of Contents
What is crawling in SEO
Crawling is the process that is done by search engine crawlers, and bots also known as spiders.
They visit or scan your website and read all your website content
It may be images, videos, infographics, or written content and different web pages of your website.
In simple they collect all your website information.
Why is crawling important for SEO
Crawling is essential for SEO. Because it is the first stage or a foundation for search engines to understand the index web pages,
and it is also the first step in your SEO journey.
Your website will never appear in search engine results if it is not crawled.
Search engine bots like Google first properly crawl your website then index your content in their server and rank it.
In the end, crawling is critical because it allows search engines to discover, analyze, and index your web pages.
It helps in the visibility of your website in search results, improves ranking, and drives organic traffic to your website.
Optimizing for crawling raises your website’s visibility and chances of being found by users looking for relevant information.
Difference Between Crawling and Indexing
Crawling
- It is the discovery and retrieval of web pages from the internet.
- It involves the use of automated software programs referred to as spiders, bots, and spiders.
- Crawlers navigate the internet by following links from one page to the next.
- The purpose of crawling is to find and obtain as many online pages as possible.
- During the crawling process, it extracts the content of web pages.
Indexing
- It is a method of organizing and storing information gathered during crawling.
- It involves making an Index, which is an organized database that contains information about websites.
- Extract keywords, headings, and other relevant information from webpage content.
- It allows for the efficient retrieval of relevant results when users do search queries.
- Connects extracted information with specified web pages in the index.
How do SEO crawlers work?
Here are some points about how crawler work
Seed URls: Search engine crawlers start crawling with seed URLs provided by the user.
It may be the homepage or specific landing page of the website.
Link discovery: They follow the links to visit from one page to another page within the website.
This process continues as they found new links on your website and discover new pages on your website
Download the website content: Crawlers download your website’s content during the process of crawling
The objective of downloading the content is to evaluate and extract relevant information from the webpage.
Remember that crawlers only download publicly accessible content from a website.
Indexing: Once the content is analyzed, search engines store the information in their index.
It displays the results of your content relevant to the user’s queries.
Tell Crawlers to what crawl and what not
You can instruct crawlers not to crawl specific pages.
It could be unnecessary URLs, insufficient content, or test pages.
Using a robots.txt file as a guide. It is a text file that is placed in a website’s root directory.
This file is used to provide instructions to web crawlers.
It includes directives that specify which parts of your website should be crawled and which should not.
links with a nofollow tag
In your website, if you include links with nofollow tags search engine crawlers will not crawl those links.
However, it is also indicating the word “nofollow” which tells the crawler to not follow this link.
Make sure that you never include the “nofollow” tag in internal links.
Every internal link you include in your web page or content
should be a “dofollow” tag.
Because you want all your web pages to get should be crawled and indexed
Right?
So keep in mind to include the “dofollow” tag while doing internal linking.
What is Google Crawl’s budget?
Crawl budget refers to the number of pages that google crawler is willing to crawl and index on a website within a given time frame.
The crawl budget can depend on the quality, size, update of content, server capability, and popularity of a website.
Sitemap
Search engine crawlers crawl your web pages through the sitemap.
It is a file that provides information about the pages on your website that you want to be crawled and indexed.
It helps bots understand the structure and organization and make it easier to discover your pages and crawl your content.
Here is how you can check and find your website sitemap.
What are the types of crawlers?
There are different types of crawlers such a
- Google Bot
- Bing Bot
- Yandex Bot
- Apple Bot
- Social media Bots
- E-commerce bot
FAQs
Is a search engine a crawler?
No, But a crawler is one of a component of a Search Engine. Because search engines consist of multiple components.
The search engine is given a specific task to the crawler to crawl all webpages from the internet.
Can I submit my website for crawling to search engines?
Yes, you can submit your webpage URL for crawling using the Google search console. first,
Go to the search console and put your webpage URL.In the URL inspection toolbar.
However, submitting your webpage URL does not guarantee it will be immediate and continuous crawling.
Can I block specific crawlers from accessing my website?
Yes, you can block specific crawlers from accessing your website by using the robots.txt file.
It’s important to note that not all crawlers strictly follow the defined rules in robots.txt.
So this was about crawling in SEO
I hope this post helped you a lot.
If you have any queries let me know in the comments
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