How to Improve Website Crawlability and Indexability? 13 Ways Explained!

Crawling and indexing are the two crucial elements of SEO. Search engines prefer content that is easy to crawl and index. So, if you want to index your website and improve its ranking, then first improve its crawlability.

Crawling in SEO means making content discoverable by search engine bots. The easier a search engine can crawl your content, the more quickly it can index it.

Yet, there are many reasons why Search Engines like Google do not crawl your content. The biggest reason is that your content is not crawlable.

How to Improve Website Crawlability and Indexability? 13 Ways Explained!: eAskme

So, the question is how to make your content crawlable and indexable.

Let’s discover the answer to these 13 strategies to improve crawl rate and indexing.

How to Improve Website Crawlability and Indexability? 13 Ways Explained!

Broken Links:

Broken internal links cause crawlability issues. Check if your website has a broken link.

To find broken links, use tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Brokenlinkcheck, Screaming Frog, etc.

How to Fix Broken Links?

• Redirect them.
• Update broken links.
• Remove broken links.

Canonicalization:

The canonical tag tells Google which page is the main page when there are two or more variations of the same page.

With a canonical tag, you tell Google which pages it should crawl. Wrong canonical tags can lead Google to pages that no longer exist.

How to Improve Canonical Tag?

• Use Search Console’s URL Inspection tool to find rogue canonical tags.
• Use canonical tags for each language when you are targeting multiple languages.

Core Web Vitals Score Optimization:

Optimizing your website to get the best Core Web Vitals score is an easy way to fix issues. The CWV score displays the user experience on your website.

Core Web Vitals include three factors:

• Largest Concertful Paint: Your page should load within 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Concertful Paint: INP score should be less than 200ms.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: CLS should be less than 0.1.

You can check the website’s Core Web Vitals score and issues using the following tools:

• Lighthouse.
• Core Web Vitals Reports in Google Search Console.
• Google PageSpeed Insights.
• These tools display the issues that your website has and suggest the fixes.

How to improve Core Web Vitals score?

• Use CDN to reduce server response time.
• Reduce JavaScript.
• Avoid layout shifts. Fix issues with your CSS and JavaScript codes.
• To improve the website's crawlability, enhance the Core Web Vitals Reports
• score.

Crawl Budget Optimization:

Optimizing the crawl budget is essential to helping Google crawl the maximum number of pages within a given time frame. Your crawl budget depends on various factors, such as popularity, relevance, site speed, and health.

You can check the website’s crawl rate in Google Search Console.

Garry Illyes also explained the reasons of less crawl rate.

How to Optimize Crawl Budget?

• Clean site structure and easy navigation.
• Fix duplicate and thin content.
• Optimize robots.txt file.
• Use canonicalization.
• Submit a sitemap and fix errors.

Duplicate Content:

Duplicate content is a significant issue. It mostly happens when you do not tell Google which URL version it should index. Wrong pagination is one of the many reasons why duplicate content exists.

How to Fix Duplicate Content?

Declare which URL version Google should crawl.

Remove Redirects:

Unnecessary redirects are bad for user experience and SEO. Get rid of redirect chains. There should not be more than one redirect between pages. Multiple redirects before visiting the destination page cause a crawlability issue.

How to Fix Redirect Loop?

Use tools like Redirect Checker or Screaming Frog to find issues.

IndexNow:

IndexNow is an easy way to boost a website’s crawlability and indexability. It quickly tells Google and other search engines about your website's changes and updates. Make sure that you send essential update signals to search engines.

How to Optimize IndexNow?

Add IndexNow within your CMS. WordPress IndexNow plugin is an easy way to do it.

Internal Link Optimization:

Internal links not only make navigation easy but also impact your website's overall SEO. Optimizing the internal link strategy is a must to make pages crawlable and indexable.

John Muller once said that internal links are critical for SEO. They tell Google what pages to crawl and how deep to go.

Poor internal links generate orphan pages. Such pages don’t get crawled as there is no way for Google to reach those pages with links.

It is an excellent strategy to link your old pages to the new and relevant pages.

How to Improve Internal Linking?

• Link essential pages on the website’s homepage.
• Fix broken links.
• Fix URL issues and redirected pages that are no longer active.
• Optimize the number of links on pages with anchor text.
• Make internal links do-follow.

Page Load Speed Optimization:

Page load speed not only impacts user experience but also affects website crawlability. It is a must to improve your page load speed to make it load faster.

How to Improve Page Load Time?

• Leverage Browser Caching to make the page load faster.
• Get premium and fast hosting.
• Minify JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files.
• Optimize images and compress them using plugins or tools.
• Reduce redirects.
• Remove third-party apps and unnecessary codes.

Robots.txt Strategy:

Robots.txt is an important step. The best use of Robots.txt is to tell Google which pages the search engine should not crawl.

Wrongly coded robots.txt can block Google from crawling your important pages.

How to Improve Robots.txt File?

• Place Robots.txt in the Root Directory.
• Don’t use the wrong wildcards
• Don’t use an index.
• Add sitemap URL.
• Don’t block website content.

Site Audit:

A site audit is a great way to find errors that can affect a website’s crawlability and indexability.

Use the following tools for website Audit:

• SEMrush
• Ahrefs
• Screaming Frog
• Lumar
• Oncrawl
• Ziptie

How to do a Site Audit?

• Audit new pages: Use Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool. Add the newly published URL and find out if any indexing issue is there.
• Check Indexability Rate: Use SEO Tools to check your website’s indexability rate. In other words, check the number of pages indexed. There is hardly any website that has 100% indexed content.
• Audit Noindex pages: Audit Noindex pages to find out what issues they have.

Structure Data:

Structured Data or Schema is a way to share information with search engines.

Structure data tells Google what the page is about. It improves the page's categorization, crawlability, and indexability. Structure data is used for articles, websites, products, reviews, events, recipes, profiles, etc.

The most popular Structured Data Types Are:

• Schema: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex collaboratively worked on Schema.
• JSON-LD: It is JavaScript-based structured data.
• Microdata: It is an HTML-based markup.

How to Use Structured Data?

• Select content-specific structured data.
• Use schema vocabulary to add markups.
• Use Google’s Rich Results Test tool to test structured data.
• Check Google Search Console’s Rich Results Report to find errors and fix them.

XML Sitemap Strategy:

Google crawls your website even when you don’t have a sitemap. But to get the best results, you must create and submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console. Your sitemap tells Google about any changes that you may have made to your website.

How to Improve XML Sitemap?

• Create XML Sitemap using WordPress plugins or SEO plugins like Yoast, AIO SEO, etc.
• Submit the site to the Search console.

Conclusion:

There are 13 most effective and easy ways to increase your website’s crawlability and indexability. It takes time, but the results are overwhelming.

Find issues and fix them. Track your website's crawl budget and issues. Improve site speed and optimize websites to make them user-friendly. Publish high-quality, helpful content.

Use these tips to improve website crawling and indexing.

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Website Crawling: What, Why and How To Optimize It?

 
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?

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.

Still have any question, do share via comments.

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Google Crawling Priorities: Gary Illyes Explained Less Crawl Rate

Gary Illyes posted on LinkedIn that Google is trying to find a way to limit the crawl rate. Google’s focus is on reducing data consumption by lowering crawling. It also means that the content should be of high quality, helpful, and user-friendly to make it crawlable.

Google has been crawling website content due to multiple factors. It is a dynamic process that crawls and indexes content.

Gary Illyes said that Google is still crawling the content at the same rate. However, the focus is to reduce the crawl rate with intelligent technologies. The focus will be on crawling valuable content for the users.

Google Crawling Priorities: Gary Illyes Explained Less Crawl Rate: eAskme

Gary Illyes Explained Less Crawl Rate:

Gary’s LinkedIn post came after the Reddit discussion, where users talked about a lower crawl rate last year. Illyes also said that Google is trying to find ways to reduce the crawl rate.

He also explained that Google does not care about the number of pages on a website to crawl a complete webpage.

How Much to Crawl?

Gary Illyes said in a podcast that Google decides crawl rate based on search demand.

While Illyes has not explained everything in his podcast, yet the rise in search queries will increase the crawl rate. If the search queries decrease, then the crawl rate will also decrease.

Illyes explained that to increase the crawl rate, your content must be worth fetching.

In other words, the content must be the direct solution to user queries.

Quality is Crawl Rate Indicator:

Google’s crawl system is dynamic. There is no fixed crawl budget. Dynamic scheduling will index website content based on quality.

Crawl Efficiency:

Crawl efficiency will improve when Google decreases its crawl budget. According to Google, it is the way to reduce carbon emissions.

Illyes is asking for comments and suggestions to help Google achieve less crawling.

Why eAskme Cares and You Should Also?

Reduced crawling will make webmasters focus more on content quality, relevance, and engagement. The focus of content and SEO should be on adding value to user experience.

Content that answers user queries helps Google decide the crawl budget for the website. With this information, we can focus on creating content that resonates with user’s expectations.

What to do?

After this announcement, here is what you can do to ensure Google crawls your website.

Quality:

Create engaging, quality, and relevant content. Content should answer user queries without wasting time.

Update content:

Create evergreen content. Update old posts. Replace outdated content with current solutions.

Search Demand:

Search demand is impacting the crawl rate. Focus on the search trends to keep the website content relevant for crawling.

Structure:

Create user-friendly, clean design, easy navigation, etc. Fix structured errors.

Conclusion:

Create quality content to help Google crawl your website even with a crawl budget. Focus on what your audience wants. Write for the audience, not for the search engines. The more your content experience improves, the more Google will crawl your content.

Still have any question, do share via comments.

Share this post with your friends and family.

join the eAskme newsletter to stay tuned with us.

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• Google Web Crawling Types
  
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