WHAT IS WEBSITE CRAWLING
Have you ever wondered how Google search delivers results for your search queries? It is definitely not magic. There are over 1.7 billion websites with over 250,000 websites being launched every day. How does Google manage to sift through all these websites and deliver right results?
Google uses something called a crawler which discovers websites through the process of crawling. This takes us to the next question, what is crawling?
Web crawling is the process through which Google discovers new pages and updates pre-existing pages by using bots that circle the archives and collecting information pertaining to these websites. If you have a new website and it is not crawled, then it is likely that your website will never be found. For your website to be registered in the index, it has to have been crawled at least once. What are these crawlers used? Let’s cover that down below.
What are Website Crawlers?
These are bots also known as web spiders that crawl the archives to find and index websites. Think of these bots are explorers who go to uncharted territories.
Every browser has its own type of bots that they use. Big search engines like Google have more than one bot and some are task-specific. Here is a list of examples of search engines bots;
Examples of Search Engine Crawlers
Search Engine | User-agent |
Googlebot | |
Bing | Bingbot |
Baidu | Slurp |
Yahoo | DuckDuckBot |
DuckDuckGo | Baiduspider |
Facebot | |
Alexa | Ia_archiver |
Amazon | Amazonbot |
This is just a small list as there are very many types of crawlers used. Google itself has more than three bots.
How Website Crawlers work.
These web crawlers discover pages through links from other pages. When a bot is crawling a page and comes across a link, it stores the link to crawl it later. If your website is new, you can ask for it to be crawled through the search console. This whole process happens in the background and minimally affects your website.
You could also request for a page to be crawled again through the search console. A point to note is that this will not make the process hurried but will only notify them of the request.
Once a bot is on your page, it looks at the Meta tags and after crawling your page, the information is stored in the index. The data is sorted and from the index, the results will be displayed once there is a search query.
Before a crawler starts moving around a website, they first take a look at the robots.txt file. A robot.txt file is a file that holds the rules that govern these bots. On a website, not all pages need to be crawled. Some of these pages are sensitive, or you only want them to be visible once a user takes a certain action.
A robot.txt file will tell these website crawlers what pages they are allowed to view and those they aren’t. This file will also control other aspects such as the crawl frequency. You can target specific bots or all bots in general. Inside the robots.txt file, you can also include a sitemap. A sitemap is like a treasure map that holds all the pages that you deem important and want them crawled.
The bots do not crawl every inch of the internet, instead, they have something called a crawl budget. A crawl budget is the number of pages that can be crawled within a given time frame. A crawl budget is very important since it will control how the bots crawl your pages. Imagine a situation where there is no crawl budget. Your website could easily get overloaded and affect its performance. There are several things that determine web crawling.
Some of the factors to pay attention to are;
- Website loading speed
- Website architecture
- Broken links
- Page titles and headings
- Internal links
- Page authority
- Duplicate content
Website Crawling Tools
Web crawlers are used by the search engines majority of the time. The only setback is there is no feedback and the whole process happens in the background. You will not know if the website crawling process has had any hindrances. This is why there are tools that you can use to check for any issues that might affect the website crawling process.
Some of these tools are;
- Semrush
- Link-Assistant
- Hexameter
- Deepcrawl
- Visual SEO Studio
- Contentking
Use these tools to highlight any issues your website might have and sort them out. The more seamless your website is, the more web pages can be crawled within the budget.
You can learn more about Search Engines and how it works though googles documentation at Google Search Central
Do you have a website and want it improved? Contact us info@savannahdatasolutionslimited.com