Crawl

What is Crawl?

In the SEO industry, crawling is a fundamental process performed by search engine bots, also known as spiders or crawlers, to discover new and updated web pages. These crawlers follow links from one page to another, gathering data that is then used to update the search engine's index. This index helps search engines quickly retrieve relevant information in response to user queries. The efficiency and thoroughness of crawling can significantly impact a website's visibility in search engine results, making it crucial for SEO strategies. Ensuring that a website is easily crawlable involves optimizing site structure, using proper internal linking, and maintaining an up-to-date sitemap.

Crawling refers to the process by which search engines like Google systematically browse the web to index content.

Examples

When Googlebot crawls a news website like BBC, it follows links from the homepage to individual articles, collecting information on each page to include in Google's search index.

An e-commerce site like Amazon benefits from efficient crawling as it helps search engines index millions of product pages, ensuring that users can find the most relevant products through search results.

Additional Information

Crawl budget refers to the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site within a given timeframe.

Improving crawlability can involve reducing duplicate content, fixing broken links, and ensuring fast page load times.

References

What is Crawling In SEO? How Does it Impact Rankings?

Website Crawling: The What, Why & How To Optimize - Search Engine Journal

Crawl-First SEO: A 12-Step Guide to Follow Before Crawling