Mystery of Crawling and Indexing for SEO

Mystery of Crawling and Indexing for SEO

Crawling and Indexing for SEO are the main secrets behind a Search Engine Result Page. You may wonder how Google shows the best result from millions. After creating a website, you want them to show in the search. But you have to wait until crawlers come to your site, index all the information. You will be amazed to know that the crawling and indexing process starts long before you even think about searching. Crawling and Indexing for SEO is the two important part of the search engine result page. But what are they and how they are related to the search?

NB: It’s a part of SEO training course, read Complete SEO Training in 30 days is recommended.

What is crawling?

Crawling is the first part of Crawling and Indexing for SEO. Crawlers are a robot of the search engine. When you create a website, Google starts reading information of your page by sending crawlers into your website. It travels millions of website of the web and index information. Millions of millions of pages are created in every hour and for a human being, it’s impossible to visit, read and index all the data. That’s why automated search crawlers or bots are used to read and understand those piles of information.

Crawlers conduct regular searches and you can request crawlers to crawl your site after uploading the robot.txt or introducing sitemaps. Also whenever you change previously indexed page or linked them to other pages or websites, then it gives a signal to Crawlers to visit the page/site again. Platforms like WordPress gives a signal to search engine whenever you introduce a new page.

The amazing part is there is another type of crawlers on the web. They are private/commercial crawlers. They also extract data from websites but for commercial use only.

It seems to be an easy process but to get the recommended speed Google uses tons of equipment and huge databases to maintain the optimal speed. Still, you don’t get the updated info at search engine instantly. The World Wide Web is huge.

You can also speed up the crawling process by verifying with the search engine using Google Webmaster Tools.

What Is indexing?

The indexing is probably the most important part of Crawling and Indexing for SEO. After a successful crawling by the bot, all it’s readable and accessible data will be stored on the search engine servers. It’s like a librarian and web is the library. You will get information about all the books in a single place and all information are stored by its relevance. The search engine does this so that it can be retrieved when a search occurs. Indexing also does 2 of the most important part of the search process,

• It returns result related to a query
• Rank websites based on importance and relevance

The ranking is the most complicated process of the search engine. Hundreds of ranking factors work behind the ranking all these factors use complex formulas. Through indexing, you will get a quick answer to your search as soon as possible and websites get a position at search engine result page.

How crawling and Indexing for SEO work:

The process of crawling and indexing for SEO is very complex. Crawler never enters your site instantly after the creation of reads your fresh contents. Because the web is too big for that. You have to wait for it.

When crawler arrives at your site, it starts to read all the information. Wait that doesn’t mean it can read all those pictures at your site. They read the Alt text of those images. You already know that it’s a bot so it cannot judge a picture by just seeing it. After accessing all available and readable information, it starts to index information into its database.

Search bots collect all information such as how much words the content have, meta information, backlinks, etc. It collects all those negative information too like broken links. After indexing, based on that information, search engine creates a rank for every available keyword from your site. Your site gets its place based on the importance and relevance of that information for the user. It’s not that simple. Hundreds of ranking factors work behind the indexing.

Importance of crawling and indexing for SEO:

After reading a lot of articles, you may have to build a belief that crawling and indexing are somehow same words. You are wrong! They are related to each other but completely different from each other. For SEO, Crawling and Indexing are 2 of the most important part of the search engine. You can’t even think about SEO without knowing crawling and indexing.

When you build a website or just updated or uploaded new contents into your site, you want everyone to see that right? But search crawlers don’t read them instantly. Sometime they may get blocked to check those chance. For a new site, crawlers usually check them occasionally. And when they enter to your site, they may have failed to index everything. Something not indexed means they will not show up in the search.

Also, there are some issues that affect the crawling such as:

• After the Google Panda update, sites that include keywords at their domain name gets preference.
• Quality backlinks will greatly increase a better rank after indexing.
• You should block crawlers to read duplicate contents by using a robot.txt.
• Meta information let crawlers read all available information.
• Well categorized sites mean effective crawling and indexing.
• The search engine gives preference to sites with more importance and relevance. If your site posses both qualities, then there is a chance that your site will be crawled instantly or at least regularly.

Ranking based on indexing:

The ranking is greatly influenced by the indexing. When a word entered into the search box, search engine checks all indexed pages related to the word. Based on algorithm and ranking signals top-ranked page will appear at the SERP. So to get a better rank or at least get a place in the ranking, you need to make sure that all of your website’s pages are readable and crawlable. If your site is not crawled and indexed correctly, then you will not get appropriate rank.

Also crawling will reveal everything of your site. If you have unintentionally uploaded duplicate content, then it will avoid indexing it, but it will create a negative impact on your site for ranking. So you should invite Google crawler after preparing your site properly or if it already has some problem then fix it properly and then use robot.txt or webmaster to let crawler crawl your site again.

It’s not the uncharted water of the web. A clear learning on the crawling and indexing process will let you understand the whole process and work to get better rank. Remember that when someone searches in the web, he searches in the index of the web. So crawling and indexing is the unavoidable course of a search engine. You can see this video to understand the whole search process easier..