What is Crawling?

Crawling is when a search engine’s robot crawls through a website. To index a website, it must first be searched.

What is crawling?

Crawling is the process of obtaining information by a search engine robot searching websites. The web crawlers are used to discover public websites. They view the web pages and follow the links. This information is then sent to the search engine’s server. On the basis of this information, search engines can determine which position you get within the search results. How often search engines crawl a website is determined by the algorithm. The algorithm determines which websites are involved, how often this happens and how many pages are viewed.

If you have certain pages on your website that you would rather not make public to every visitor, you can block crawling by using robots.txt. A robots.txt file acts as a kind of manual and the robots will look for it first when they view a page. By blocking certain pages in the robots.txt file, you can restrict crawling.

A good position in the search results by crawling

Do you want your website to rank high in the search results? Then it is important that you have your website crawled. This allows search engines to understand your website, which is important for a good position. Do you want a good position in Google? Then have your websites crawled.

Crawling websites doesn’t always happen. This depends on the crawl budget, which determines how long it takes to crawl your website. The following applies: the higher the budget, the longer Google takes. Pay close attention to crawl errors, because you don’t want the budget to be spent on pages that no longer exist.

What are crawl errors?

A crawl error is that Google cannot find your webpage and therefore cannot view it. In short, a crawl error is a broken link. This can be recognized by the 404 error message on the page. In other words, it means the page was not found. The moment a website contains a lot of crawl errors, Google will see this as a website that is not well maintained. In addition, this also leads to the crawl budget being spent on the wrong pages and you lose important link value. It is therefore important to prevent or quickly resolve crawl errors.

You can easily fix crawl errors via a 301 redirect. When you use CMS, you can set up 301 redirects by means of a plug-in. You can find the crawl errors through Google Search Console.

Crawling and SEO marketing

Crawling and SEO marketing influence each other. This way, crawling ensures that you are more visible in the results of search engines. In addition, good SEO marketing ensures that robots will crawl your website better. Crawling and SEO marketing interact in order to ensure the crawl budget and the ranking in the search results.

Our SEO marketers will optimize various technical factors in technical SEO. This includes optimizing the crawl budget. For example, they ensure that the websites can be viewed properly by Google in order to ensure a higher ranking.