In SEO World you may already read about crawling a lot of time all over the internet, but do you really know how crawling works and help you to rank your website? I will try to explain in very simple words so please don’t miss any line.
Search engines have a number of computer programs or website crawling spiders called web spiders or web crawlers (thus the word Crawling), which are responsible for finding information that is publicly available on the websites over the Internet.
To simplify a complicated process, it’s enough for you to know that the job of these spiders crawlers or bots(also known as search engine spiders), is to scan the websites over the Internet and find the servers which are (also known as webservers) hosting websites. That’s why premium and known servers get their website crawled quickly than the new unknown servers.
Search engine crawlers create a list of all the webservers to crawl, the number of websites hosted by each server, and then start work.
Search Engine bots visit each website and by using different techniques, Spiders try to find out how many pages they have, whether it is text content, images, videos, or any other format (CSS, HTML, javascript, etc). for that purpose crawlers take help of sitemaps to get all pages scanned and crawled to database.
Learn: What is sitemap?
When crawlers are visiting a website, besides taking note of the number of pages they also follow any links (either pointing to pages within the site or to external websites), and thus they discover more and more pages. known as OBL links.
Search engine spiders do this continuously and they also keep track of changes made to a website so that they know when new pages are added or deleted, when links are updated, etc.
If you take into account that there are more than 200 trillion individual pages on the Internet today and on average thousands of new pages are published on a daily basis, you can imagine that this is a lot of work.
Why care about the crawling process?
When your website design and development is completed. Your first concern while optimizing your website for search engines is to make sure that spiders or crawlers can access it correctly otherwise if they cannot ‘read’ your complete website, you shouldn’t expect much in terms of high rankings or search engine traffic. Also, Don’t forget to add HTML and XML sitemaps to your websites.
As explained above, crawlers have a lot of work to do and you should try and make their job easier.
As you’ll read in this article, there are a number of things to do to make sure that crawlers can discover and access your website in the fastest possible way without problems.
