What Is Crawling in SEO, and Why Is It Important?

Like other specialized fields, search engine optimization (SEO) has its own lingo that includes over 200 terms. Among them are various expressions about crawling, raising the question: What is crawling in SEO?

Understanding crawlers and web crawling is a key part of successful SEO. Check out this quick breakdown of the topic.

What Is Crawling in SEO?

In SEO, crawling is when search engine programs scan a web domain’s pages to learn their content. Common names for this software include web crawlers, crawlers, bots, and spiders.

The bot looks at all information on the page, including images, text, and video. That’s why these all play a role in whether your SEO is successful.

Importantly, you may have pages you don’t want to get crawled because they’re not ones you want to show up in search results. These can be test pages, login pages, and pages behind a paywall. With technical SEO, you can tell search engines not to crawl and index those pages.

Why Is Crawling Important for SEO?

Crawling is important in SEO because it’s the way search engines learn what content is on your site. From that point, it can index your pages and show them in search results. Therefore, you must consider crawling in SEO tactics so search engines see and rank your web pages.

What Is the Crawling Process?

The crawling process begins when the crawler selects a URL from its seed queue — its list of known URLs. It downloads the page’s content to understand what it’s about. The crawler also extracts the links from that page and puts those in the seed queue. Then, it continues to the next URL in the seed queue and repeats the process.

Search engines want their crawlers to be efficient and set time limits on how long a crawler spends on a site. Consequently, crawlers won’t cover many pages on a site with an overly complex structure. In a sense, the domain is too “deep” to crawl thoroughly, meaning pages get skipped.

That’s why you need to monitor the technical side of crawling and SEO to determine your crawl depth. A good way to ensure your site is easier to crawl is by having a good amount of internal links and obtaining external links from authoritative, high-ranking sites.

What Is Indexing?

Indexing is the process of storing crawled pages in a search engine’s database (its index). From that point, the search engine determines where to put a page on results according to its ranking factors (the “algorithm”).

Therefore, crawling in SEO is not the only factor you have to worry about. Not all crawled pages get indexed because a search engine can determine that a page isn’t worthy of indexing, which keeps it out of search results.

Common reasons for not getting indexed include duplicate content, low-quality content, or technical problems on your site. This emphasizes the importance of creating high-quality content and promptly troubleshooting technical SEO problems.

Master Crawling in SEO With a Little Help From Your Friends at BKA

If you need help mastering the tricks to improve the web crawling in your SEO, we can help. Contact our BKA team to learn more.