How does someone search for and find desired content on the internet? The person needs to open a web browser, for example Google Chrome, type keywords that are relevant to the content being searched for and then press the Enter keyboard button. Immediately, search results pages by the Google search engine (search engine results pages | SERP) that are relevant to the keyword are displayed.
Google search results can come from many blogs or websites and perhaps websites that you manage. Someone needs to click on one of the search results to read the full content. Then, how can the Google Chrome browser display search results from many websites? This is all because of the crawling and indexing process by search engine crawlers.
Search engine crawlers are also called web crawlers, spiders, or bots. In order for a website to appear in search results, the website must be crawled and indexed first. How it works, search engine crawlers find websites on the internet, crawl the pages, follow the links found, read and analyze the content, and then index what has been crawled.
So, search results from many websites that are displayed in a web browser are content that has been crawled and indexed. If a web page does not appear on the search results page, perhaps the web page has not been indexed because there are problems with crawling and indexing. This problem can result in the website losing visitors and conversions. This of course hurts SEO performance.
An index can be described as a database of web pages along with information related to the content in them resulting from the crawling process, while the ranking for the position of a blog or website on a search results page is determined by the search engine algorithm. Optimization of blogs or websites needs to be done to optimize crawlability and indexability and to rank on SERP, one way to achieve this is through quality content.
What is Crawlability and Indexability?
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| What is Crawlability and Indexability? |
Crawlability is defined as the ability of search engine crawlers to crawl website pages and read and analyze their content. If the website does not have crawlability problems, then all web pages can be crawled and their content can be analyzed.
On the other hand, if there are crawlability problems such as broken or dead links, the page cannot be crawled and the content cannot automatically be analyzed.
Indexability can be interpreted as the ability of search engine crawlers or bots to analyze and add web pages to their index so that they can be displayed on search results pages. If a blog or website page cannot be indexed, then the page will not appear in search results and has the potential to lose visitors.
1. What is Crawlability?
Web crawlers simply follow the link on the website to see where it leads. The crawler will follow the link, scan the content, and then index the page based on what it finds. If a page has links to other websites and pages, crawlers will also follow them.
So, crawlability refers to how well bots can scan and index your pages. The more crawlable your website is, the easier it is to index, which can help improve your ranking in SERPs. Remember that web crawlers are constantly working, and they will return to your website regularly to see if it has changed or been updated.
If you customize your website frequently, the crawler will return to index the page more often. Once the crawler registers changes, it sends updates to the index. This way, only the current content will appear in search results.
While you may think that your website is inherently crawlable, there are several reasons why bots can't navigate your pages. For example, if there are too many broken links or redirects, the bot will be stopped in its tracks.
2. What is Indexability or Indexability?
Although web crawlers can follow links and navigate pages, their ability to know what is on the page is very limited. For example, bots cannot “see” images or videos because they only pay attention to HTML text.
So, you should have a lot of visual content on your pages, but Google and other search engines won't know about that content, so they won't index your website properly.
Crawlability vs Indexability: How Do They Impact SERP Rankings?
Overall, of course you want your website to be crawled and indexed as much as possible. The easier it is for bots to follow links and understand what's on your page, the more likely they will rank that page higher in the SERPs.
While both options are essential for SEO purposes, indexability is slightly more valuable. If search engines don't know what's on a page, bots won't know whether the content is relevant to a particular search.
So, your website's position will see a bigger shift if you don't invest in a technical SEO strategy. We should point out that improving crawlability and indexing ability has nothing to do with the user.
Web crawlers pay no attention to page layout, color schemes, branding, and other visual elements. Therefore, because search engines have so many pages to scan and index, making the bot's job more efficient will help you rank higher overall.
How to optimizing crawling and indexing?
Crawlability and indexability are important factors so that a blog or website can be displayed on search engine results pages. There are several things you can do to optimize crawlability and indexability.
1. Submit a sitemap
A sitemap is a small file that contains direct links to each web page. Sitemaps also provide valuable metadata such as updated website pages. You can submit sitemaps to search engines like Google via Google Search Console.
Website pata can help search engine crawlers to crawl more website pages simultaneously in one visit so that there will be many blog or website pages that can be indexed. It would be different without a sitemap. Search engine crawlers may only crawl a few website pages so that indexing is not optimal.
2. Strengthen internal links
Internal links or internal links are links that connect one page to another page on the same blog or website. Two pages are generally linked internally because they still have the same topic or theme. By visiting other related pages, blog or website visitors can obtain more complete information.
Apart from reducing the bounce rate, internal links also affect crawlability and indexability. The Google search engine follows internal links to crawl other pages, read and analyze the content and then index them. You can increase internal links between pages so that they are all connected to ensure search engine crawlers find all website pages.
3. Update and add new content regularly
Content is King. Content is the main reason visitors come to the website. Content can also increase crawlability and indexability because search engine crawlers will visit websites that update and add content more often. This means that search engine crawlers will crawl the page, analyze the content and index it more quickly.
4. Speed up web page load times
Search engine crawlers generally have a limited time to crawl and index web pages. This time limit is known as the crawl budget. If the time runs out, the search engine crawler will leave the website. You need to ensure that web pages can load quickly so that more web pages can be crawled before they run out of time.
Page load speed is an important factor. There are various efforts that can be made so that your blog or website pages can load quickly. Make sure you don't use substandard web hosting. You can also use compression, reduce CSS, JavaScript and HTML, eliminate or reduce redirects and limit the use of extensions if the website is created with a CMS.
5. Assemble or add breadcrumbs
It was explained at the beginning that search engine crawlers follow links to crawl blog or website pages, analyze the content, and add them to their index. Increasing internal links ensures that more web pages can be crawled. One of the best ways to maximize internal links on a website is to add breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs ensure websites have the opportunity to have lots of internal links across pages and categories. Breadcrumbs are very effective for websites that have a deep structure or hierarchy. With breadcrumbs, search engine crawlers can easily crawl web pages that are located in the deepest structure or hierarchy.
6. Avoid duplicating content
Almost all websites have duplicate content. Duplication of content increases when websites are created with a CMS because most of it results from errors in feature settings in the CMS system itself. Duplication of content is also caused by, for example, changing a URL that has been indexed carelessly or moving an article to another directory without doing a 301 redirect.
Duplicate content must be fixed to ensure search engine crawlers crawl the right URLs. You can add the rel=canonical attribute to the official URL that must be crawled by search engine crawlers. If your website is created with a CMS, you can use extensions to deal with duplicate content more quickly and easily.
7. Update the robots.txt file
Robots.txt is a text file located in the root directory of the website. Robots.txt is actually not mandatory, but almost all websites have it. Robots.txt tells search engine crawlers how you want your website to be crawled. Its use is more about managing search engine crawler traffic and keeping the website from being overloaded with requests which impact website performance.
Robots.txt tells search engine crawlers what can be crawled and indexed on a website. Make sure you don't intentionally block search engine crawlers from doing their job. Allow (allow) search engine crawlers to crawl and index pages that really need to be crawled and indexed and do not allow (disallow) crawling certain website pages that are not allowed to be crawled and indexed.
Conclusion
When optimizing a website for search engines using SEO techniques, most businesses and web developers will focus on core elements such as keywords and relevant content. There are so many websites and pages on the internet, that it is impossible for the professionals at Google to be able to go through them one by one to check your SEO efforts.
Instead, search engines rely on bots and algorithms to determine a page's content and whether it is relevant to a particular search query.