Website crawling depends upon many things, such as website structure, internal linking, sitemap, etc.
It is important to ensure that Googlebot and other search engine bots can easily crawl your website.
Without crawling your website content, Google cannot find and index the pages.
Optimize website crawling to expand your content reach to search engines.
Here is what you must know about website crawling.
What is Crawling in SEO?
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| Website Crawling, What, Why and How To Optimize It: eAskme |
In SEO, crawling means letting search engine bots discover your content.
Ensure search engine bots can access your website content, such as videos, text, images, links, etc.
How Search Engine Web Crawlers Work?
Search engine crawlers can discover page content and links and download your webpage content.
After crawling the content, search engine bots send the crawled content to the search index library. Search engines also extract links to web pages.
Crawled links can be in different categories, such as;
- New URLs
- Pages without guidance to crawl.
- Updated URls
- Not-updated URLs
- Disallowed URLs
- Inaccessible URLs
Crawled URLs will be listed in the crawl queue and assigned priorities.
Search engines assign priority based on many factors.
Search engines have created their algorithms to crawl and index website content.
You should know that popular search engine bots such as Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, Yandex Bot, DuckDuckGo, Bingbot, etc., work differently.
Why Should Every Webpage Be Crawled?
If a page is not crawled, it will never get indexed in SERP. It is necessary to let search engines quickly crawl website pages as soon as you make any changes or publish new posts.
The latest posts will be irrelevant if not crawled quickly.
Crawl Efficiency Vs. Crawl Budget:
Google search bots will not crawl and index your entire website.
100% crawling is not what always happens. Most of the massive sites face crawling issues.
You will find all not index links under “Discovered - Currently not indexed” in the Google search console report.
You will face some crawling issues even if you do not see any page under this section yet.
Crawl Budget:
The crawl budget refers to the number of pages Googlebot wants to crawl in a specific period.
You can check the crawl requests in “Google Search Console.”
Here you should understand that increasing the number of crawls does not mean that all the pages are getting crawled. It is better to improve the quality of crawling.
Crawl Efficiency:
Crawl efficiency is the delay between publishing a page or update and getting that page or update crawled.
Crawl optimization can make a bigger impact on your website ranking.
Search Engine Support for Crawling:
Best crawling practices help search engines rank optimized pages and reduce the greenhouse effect of running search engines.
SEOs are talking about two APIs that can improve search crawling, such as:
- Non-Google Support from IndexNow
- Google Support from The Indexing API
These APIs push your content to search engine crawlers for quick crawling.
Non-Google Support from IndexNow:
IndexNow API is one of the most popular APIs Bing, Seznam and Yandex use for quick indexing. Right now, Google is not favoring IndexNOW API.
Now only search engines but CDNs, CRMS, and SEO tools also use IndexNow API to quickly index pages.
If your audience is not from search engines, then you may not find massive benefits with IndexNow.
You should also know that IndexNow will add additional load to your server. Understand if you can bear the cost of IndexNow to improve crawl efficiency.
Google Support the Google Indexing API:
Google Indexing API is for those who want to improve Google crawl efficiency.
Google has said that Indexing API is only for the event and job posting markups. But webmasters have found that it can also help improve search efficiency for other pages.
Here you should understand that crawling is not indexing. Google crawls your page, and if it is non-compliant, it will not index.
Manual Submission in the Google Search Console Support:
You can submit your URLs manually in the Google search console.
But you should only submit 10 URLs within 24 hours. You can also use third-party apps or scripts for automatic submissions.
How to Create Efficient Website Crawling?
Server Performance:
Always host your website on a reliable and fast server. Your site host status should display as green.
Get rid of meaningless content:
Remove outdated and low-quality posts to improve crawl efficiency. This will help you in fixing the index bloat issue.
Go to the “Crawled – Currently not Indexed” section and fix the issues for 404 pages and use 301 redirects.
When to use Noindex:
Use Noindex and rel=canonical tags to clean your Google search index report. You can even use robots.txt to disallow pages you do not want search engines to crawl.
Block non-SEO URLs such as parameter pages, functional pages, spaces, API Urls, and useless styles, scripts, and images.
Fix pagination issues to improve crawling.
Optimize Sitemap:
Use XML sitemap and optimize it for better crawling.
Internal Linking:
Internal links can easily scale crawl efficiency.
Use breadcrumbs, pagination, links, and filters to connect pages without scripts.
Conclusion:
Website crawling is important for the success of an online website or business. It is also the basic of SEO.
Optimize your web crawling performance and fix issues to improve crawl efficiency.
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