What is Google Crawling? How are SEOs helped by it?
Let’s understand the word crawling in this context to start having a better idea of what Google crawling is. Crawling in this context refers to going through or “crawling” through various web pages to put them in separate databases and have them indexed on the search engines. Although crawling and indexing are two very different processes, they are done by one piece of software, commonly known as the crawler. So how does it work? Why is it important to interact with it and how is it done? What are its various uses? Let’s try to understand the entire concept on its own first and then try to understand the answers to these questions.
What is Google Crawler?
As we discussed in the above statements as to what a crawler is, various search engines utilize different crawlers for their own needs and purposes. Such of them is Google. Google as of now has 15 crawlers and the primary one being Googlebot. These crawlers “crawl” through pages and pages on the web for new or updated content that hasn’t been registered in the database.
How does it work?
Google or any search engine owns central registry URLs, which means that whenever a new page or website has been posted on a search engine, it isn’t notified about the updates and posts and rather has to go around searching the entire internet and then constantly add the newly discovered pages to Google’s huge database.
As the Googlebot finds a new page, it renders and envisions the HTML or any third-party script. This is then processed and stored and then indexed or ranked. As soon as the page has been indexed, it is added to Google’s huge database named Google Index.
Google has generally classified two different crawlers to render different pages. Googlebot Smartphone and Googlebot desktop are the two variants that are used to crawl through pages through different mediums of devices.
How to interact with the crawl bot and why is it important?
So Googlebot doesn’t just randomly go through pages and pages by just accidentally “stumbling” upon it while going through the entire internet. It works through various complex algorithms and protocols to navigate through various pages and categorize them and help in the indexing process.
1) Prioritizing Links
If a website has been already acknowledged by Googlebot, it will keep coming back to check for updates and posts of new pages. Make sure to link the newly added stuff to the priority corner, ideally to the homepage as it can be widely displayed there and can be attention-grabbing.
2) Click Depth
Click depth refers to how many steps or “clicks” it takes for Googlebot to access the newly added page. Ideally, a new page should be within the reach of 3 clicks as it would be easier for Googlebot to approach and acknowledge and index it.
3) Indexing Protocol
Certain tags and statements can restrict access to Googlebot, specifically, if the access has been restricted by robots.txt which is a root directory file that restricts the bot to access the elements and content from that specific page and hence, would not be indexed either. Other tags can however be caught under the algorithm and would be able to rank higher in the database, helping it gain more reach and publicity, and could most definitely be tagged as the first option.
Site-mapping
Site mapping refers to the entire document or file that indicates all the pages that you would want to be displayed on google. A user can submit their site map through Google via Google Search Console. This helps Googlebot to crawl and visit and also lets it know if there are any specific updates on the page.
Why is Google Crawling Important for SEO?
Crawling is important for SEO to rank them, index the newly published works, and output the most relevant ones. As a keyword is entered into the search bar the bot is already going through the various pages that come under that keyword’s domain and then provides you with the best and most relevant articles. Hence, for your work to be at the top rank and be interacted with, it is important to comply with the various protocols of the crawlers.
Sum Up
With that, we end our introduction and basic knowledge had been needed for the basic understanding of Crawlers. And according to the various aspects and studies that we had focused on, hopefully, it has made clear the various questions that had been raised at the beginning of this article.