What is Crawling in SEO? How Search Engines Discover & Index Sites

Imagine a librarian assigned to catalog books for an increasing collection without a cataloging system.  Crazy, right? This is exactly how search engines would struggle to navigate the web without efficient crawling systems. Search engines have developed powerful algorithms to crawl, explore, and navigate the web efficiently during the process of indexing.

In this blog we are going to discuss the following points:

What Is Crawling in SEO?
Types of Crawlers in SEO?
Crawling Vs Indexing
Meaning of Crawl Depth
Crawl Delay Vs Crawl Depth

Crawling is important for search engines because they crawl various types of content across the web. And it is important, even if you don’t realize it, to optimize your website for crawlers, so that you have a fair chance of ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). In this guide, we will cover everything from what crawling is to how you can influence it for better search visibility.

What Is the Crawling Process in SEO?

The crawling process involves how search engines read the internet. The process involves search engine bots or spiders or web crawlers that skim read pages, browse links, and collect information to create databases that subsequently direct search engine indexing. The data collected helps search engines ascertain a page’s relevance and value pre-indexing.

Without crawling, your website will not be indexed, and unless a search engine indexes it, it cannot be found on any of the search results pages. This makes crawling an integral part of an SEO strategy.

What Types of Crawlers Are There?

Different types of crawlers serve distinct uses in the digital ecosystem; some are:

• Search Engine Crawlers: Sent by search engines like Google and Bing to index online content so that information can be retrieved fast.

• Commercial Crawlers: Affected by the company to watch competitors, gather market insights, or aggregate content from many sources.

• Personal or Hobbyist Crawlers: Built by the individual who intends to work on specific projects such as the project of archiving content or research.

While each crawler already has its own approach and intention, they form a conjoined kinship in one common aspect, to establish a holistic idea of the network. 

Here’s a table of common search engines and their crawlers:

Is There a Difference Between Crawling and Indexing?

While closely related, crawling and indexing are separate stages in the search engine process:

On this occasion, crawlability refers to how easy it is for search engine bots to navigate a site’s content. A site with less than robust crawlability will struggle to be found and indexed by search engines, owing directly to its poor visibility in search results.

Crawlability Influencers:

• Sitemaps: XML Sitemaps Verifies Crawlers To Show Major Pages.
• Robots.txt: This text file determines which areas of your site crawlers can access.
• Website Errors: Errors such as broken links, server errors, and large amounts of redirects can affect crawlability.

Who Are Crawlers in SEO?

A crawler is an automated program used by search engines to determine the layout of web pages and gather information for the search engine. The crawlers are the ones that are constantly buzzing over the net to discover and index new or updated content, and, in turn, bring relevance and accuracy into search results.

The crawl rate is how fast search engine bots visit a web page. With a higher rank, search engines will periodically update their index with the latest content.

Factors Affecting Crawl Rate: 

• Website authority: High-authority sites get crawled more often
• Content updates: Fresh content encourages frequent crawling.
• Crawl budget: Search engines allocate a limited number of resources for crawling each site.

Crawling serves several key functions:

Discovering new websites and web pages.
Updating indexed content with fresh information.
Identifying broken links and errors.
Evaluating site structure and link hierarchy.

Crawl depth indicates how deep the bot goes along the structure of a Web page. The greater depth means less ability for the search engines to locate and index the page.

Example of Crawl Depth:

Depth 0: Homepage (e.g., example.com)
Depth 1: Category page (e.g., example.com/blog)
Depth 2: Blog post (e.g., example.com/blog/article)
Depth 3: Additional layers of navigation make indexing harder.

How to Improve Crawl Depth?

Use clear navigation menus.
Implement breadcrumbs for better structure.
Keep important pages close to the homepage.

Crawl delay: The time or the make specification of wherein it signifies how often a search engine spider can crawl a website to not overly burden the server.

Example of Crawl Delay:
If a bot aggressively crawls a site,
causing slow performance, a webmaster can set a delay in
the robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Crawl-delay: 10
This instructs Googlebot to wait 10 seconds between requests.

How to Improve Crawling on Your Website

1.Submit a Sitemap: Ensure all important pages are included and submit it to Google Search Console.
2.Optimize Robots.txt: Allow bots to access essential pages while blocking unnecessary ones.
3.Use Meta Robots Tags: Control indexing behavior for specific pages.
4.Improve Internal Linking: Strengthen page connections for better crawlability.
5.Fix Broken Links and Errors: Maintain a clean site to enhance crawl efficiency.

Conclusion:

The crawling phase is actually the very first step by which search engines locate and index content, and its function clearly affects the visibility and ranking of your site. Proper management of the crawling process makes a site more accessible to search engines, thus optimizing it for better search engine performance. In summary, crawlability is keeping your pages indexed and users searching for such information will be able to access them.

FAQs

Provided by the capability of search engine accessible and path finder’s on-site content efficiently with search engine readability, crawlability in SEO is the guide which decides the feasibility of search engines to index pages within a website. Site structure, internal linking, robots.txt files, and technical SEO elements such as canonical tags and sitemaps are all factors acting upon crawlability.

A crawler, also known as a search engine robot or spider, is an automated program that search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo use to scan and index web pages. Some examples are: Googlebot (for Google), Bingbot (for Bing), and YandexBot (for Yandex). Crawlers follow links from page to page and gather information about them during that time to update the indexes that live within search engines.

Crawl rate refers to the amount of requests a bot makes to a given website in a certain period. It dictates how often a search engine crawls and updates its index of a website. Crawl rate is determined by server performance, website speed, how frequently the content updates, and Google Search Console settings.

Here are some tips for improving crawlability:
Optimize Internal Linking – Make sure that your pages are all interconnected properly.
Use Sitemap – Submit an XML sitemap in Google Search Console.
Fix Broken Links – Redirect or remove dead links.
Page Speed – A website with low speed will take much more time for crawling.
Check robots.txt – Make sure it does not include important pages you want crawlers to access.

Crawling: The process by which search engine bots discover and read content on your site.
Indexing: The process of storing crawled pages in the search engine database for later ranking on search results.

Mohit Verma

I am an experienced professional with 9+ years of experience in Search Engine Optimization. I am on a mission to provide industry focused job oriented SEO so the students/mentees can get their dream SEO job and and start working from day 1.