What is the difference between Crawling and Indexing?

The difference between crawling and indexing is that crawling is searching a website and indexing organizes the information.

What is the difference between crawling and indexing?

The difference between crawling and indexing is that crawling is about searching websites where the collection of information is central. Then indexing is about organizing the collected information. The process of search engines consists of three steps, the first step is crawling and the second step is indexing which is followed by ranking (the third step). Indexing is therefore the next step to crawling a website.

To make the difference clear, we’ll explain both crawling and indexing in more detail.

What is crawling?

Crawling is the process of searching websites in order to extract as much information as possible. Robots, or web crawlers, look for new content and scour the entire world wide web. The web crawlers do this by means of, for example, internal links or via an XML sitemap. The algorithm determines which websites are searched, how often this happens and how many pages are viewed.

Here you can find more information about crawling.

What is indexing?

Once web crawlers start searching websites and collecting content from them, this content is then archived and organized during indexing. This means that a copy of the page is made and that the Google search index then stores it. This search index stores all copies of crawled pages. The search index can therefore be seen as a large database. Indexing thus ensures that information on web pages is added to search engines.