Crawling and Indexing: How to Make Google Search to Index Your Site?
Crawling and indexing are how Google analyzes and interprets your site’s content and can affect your website’s SEO. This post shared by the SEO company in Mumbai will help you understand the difference between crawling and indexing, the effects on your website’s indexability and crawlability, and how you can increase both. What’s the matter with crawling? Crawling is a method that allows search engines to find new content on the internet. To accomplish this, they utilize crawling bots that follow hyperlinks to websites that have been indexed to new ones. As thousands of websites are created or updated daily, crawling is a continuous process repeated repeatedly. Martin Splitt, Google Webmaster Trend Analyst, describes the process of crawling very simply: “We start with some URLs and take a link from there. This is crawling through the web (one) page at a time and more or less.” Crawling is just the beginning stage of the process. The next step is indexing as well as ranking (pages that go through different ranking algorithms) and then serving the results of the search. Let’s dive a bit deep here and examine the process of crawling. What is a “search engine crawler”? The search engine crawler (also known as a crawling bot or web spider) is a program that crawls through websites through their contents, scans them for content, and then collects the information to index the content. When a crawler comes across the website via hyperlinks, it looks at its contents and scans the entire visual and textual elements, such as links, HTML, CSS, JavaScript files, etc. It then transmits (or collects) the information to be processed and ultimately indexed. Google is a web search engine that utilizes the Googlebot web crawler, which is its very own known as Googlebot. There are two primary kinds of crawlers. Googlebot smartphone – the main crawler Googlebot Desktop – second crawler Googlebot is a web crawler that prefers to use as a mobile browser, but it could also crawl every website using its desktop crawler to see how the website functions and behaves in both ways. The budget for crawling can determine the frequency of crawling of newly added pages. What is a crawl budget? The crawl budget is the sum of money and frequency of crawling carried out by web crawlers. Also, it specifies the number of pages to be crawled and the frequency at which those pages are re-crawled by Googlebot. Two major factors establish the crawler budget: Limit on crawl rate: The number of pages that can be simultaneously crawled by the site without overloading the server. Demand for crawls: The number of web pages that have to be crawled, or recrawled, by Googlebot. Crawl budgets are the primary concern for huge websites that have millions of pages but not for websites with just hundreds of pages. Furthermore, the fact that a huge budget for crawling doesn’t guarantee any advantages for a site as it’s not a sign of quality to search engines. How do you define indexing? According to the experts at the best SEO company, Indexing is the process that involves analyzing and storing web pages crawled in the database (also known as index). Only pages that are indexed are ranked and utilized to search for the appropriate keywords. When a web browser discovers an undiscovered website, Googlebot passes its content (e.g., text, images, videos, meta-tags, attributes, etc.) in the indexing phase, which is where the information is analyzed to gain a better understanding of the context, and then put into the index. Martin Splitt explains the function of the indexing stage. Is: “Once you have the pages, we must be able to understand the information on them. It is important to determine the purpose of this content and what purpose it is supposed to serve. This is the second step which includes indexing.” For the above, Google uses the so-called Caffeine indexing system, which was first introduced in the year 2010. The database of the Caffeine index can store millions and millions of gigabytes of pages. The pages are processed systematically and indexed (and crawled again) by Googlebot by the content they hold. Googlebot is not the only one to visit websites through mobile crawlers first. However, it also likes to index content on mobile versions of its websites following the so-called Mobile-First Indexing update. What exactly is Mobile-First Indexing? The mobile-first indexing feature was first launched in 2016 after Google announced that it would predominantly index and use the content on its mobile version. Google’s official announcement clarifies: “In the mobile-first indexing process, we’ll obtain the information about your site’s mobile version. So ensure that Googlebot can see all the contents and all the resources available there.” Because most people use smartphones to browse the web is logical that Google would like to view web pages “in similar ways” as users do. This is also an explicit demand to website owners to ensure that their websites are mobile-friendly and responsive. Notice: It is important to understand the fact that mobile-first indexing doesn’t always mean Google cannot crawl websites with their desktop agents (Googlebot Desktop) to check the content of both versions. This section discusses the concept that crawling is indexing from a theoretical point of view. Let’s examine the practical steps you can take in your site’s crawling and/or indexing process. How do you make Google search and index your site? In the case of the actual process of crawling or indexing your website, it is not possible to provide a “direct instruction” to cause search engines to crawl your site. The experts at the best SEO agency in Singapore share various methods to control if, when, or how your site is crawled or indexed. Let’s look at what options you have in terms of “telling Google about your existence.” 1. Do nothing and remain a passive approach. From a technological point of perspective, you don’t need to do anything to have your site crawled and indexed by