Crawling

Definition

Crawling is the process by which search engine bots systematically discover and scan website pages to understand their content and structure.

Crawling Relevance For SEO

Crawling is fundamental for SEO as the discovery, understanding and indexing of your website by search engine bots will largely determine how it is ranked in search engine results pages (SERPs). If a website is not properly crawled, it might not be correctly indexed. Consequently, it may not appear in the search results or may not rank as high as desired for relevant keywords. Good crawling visibility increases the chances of a webpage appearing higher in the SERPs, leading to increased organic traffic.

Brief Crawling History and Evolution

In the early days of search engines in the 1990s, crawling was manual and limited. As the web grew exponentially, search engines developed automated crawlers that were faster, more scalable, and able to handle modern web technologies. Over time, crawling systems have become extremely sophisticated, using machine learning and algorithms to crawl billions of pages efficiently. Search engines continuously refine crawling to handle new web developments and content types.

Crawling Best Practices for SEO

• Site Architecture: Use a simple, shallow, logical site architecture to make pages easy to discover and crawl.
• Internal Linking: Link important pages together to help crawlers navigate and understand site structure.
• Page Speed: Optimize page speed and server response times for efficient crawling.
• robots.txt: Use robots.txt carefully to avoid blocking important pages from crawling.
• Sitemaps: Create XML sitemaps to guide crawlers to important pages.
• Dynamic Content: Render dynamic content server-side when possible so crawlers can access it
• Duplicate Content: Avoid duplicate content issues that reduces crawling efficiency and creates indexing problems.