What is web crawling?
For search engines like Google and Bing to deliver results quickly, they depend on already having stored millions of web pages in their “library.” It is from this database that the search engine retrieves the results shown in the search results.
To achieve this, bots (also called spiders) from Google and Bing continuously crawl websites across the world to ensure they have up-to-date information on which pages deliver the best results when users perform searches.
Crawling happens, among other things, by the bots following links, both external backlinks and internal links, and assessing the quality of the different websites against the topics and wording used on the sites.
How to optimize for web crawling?
There are a number of different measures you can take to make it as easy as possible for search engines to read and understand the content on your website. This is one of the most important things en SEO-spesialist does, and here are some examples:
- Have an up-to-date and properly formatted sitemap
- Have a robots.txt file that is properly configured
- Have a good structure for internal linking
- Check the indexing in Google Search Console and address any error messages
Frequently Asked Questions
What is crawling?
Web Crawling is the “scanning” or information gathering that search engines perform to index websites in their database.
Can Google and Bing index all websites?
No, there can be technical limitations that prevent the search engine from indexing all the pages on your website. Read more in this article to see what you can do to fix this.
