What is Crawling?
Crawling is the process of a search engine scanning websites and webpages for content. The crawler, or robot, follows predetermined rules to find new content on the web. It reads relevant data from each website, including titles, headings, keywords and links. The crawler then stores this information in an index that can be used to generate search engine results.
What is Indexing?
Indexing is the process of organizing data that has been crawled by search engines. After the crawler has completed its task, it passes all the information it has collected onto an indexer which organizes and stores all of the information into an easily retrievable format. This allows search engines to quickly locate and display relevant websites when users submit queries.
Benefits of Crawling and Indexing
Having a website properly crawled and indexed by search engines can provide many benefits. This includes improved visibility in organic search, increased website traffic, improved usability, better site structure and higher rankings within SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Additionally, having your website regularly crawled ensures that users will always have access to accurate information and fresh content when they visit your site.
How to Optimize Your Site For Crawling & Indexing
Optimizing your website for crawling and indexing requires implementing best practices such as ensuring a robust internal linking structure, optimizing URLs for readability, adding relevant meta tags to pages and making sure all pages contain unique title tags & descriptions. You should also ensure that you are not blocking any of your important pages from being crawled or indexed by using directives such as “Noindex” or “Nofollow”. Additionally, keeping track of your backlinks will help you maintain a healthy link profile & avoid penalties from Google’s algorithm updates like Penguin & Panda.