Crawling – How it is done and what purpose it has

Crawling is the process by which search engine robots crawl the information on your web pages, analyzing all its content, in addition to detecting and following all the links it may contain.

This entire process has the objective of collecting the information necessary to display your page and its essential information in search results that contain terms related to the information or content of your web pages. For this reason, the behavior of the search engine crawler is a very influential factor in SEO positioning strategies .      

Índice

  1. Types of crawlers
  2. How Google does this process

             

Types of crawlers

There are various bots responsible for crawling and indexing web pages , each with different algorithms to perform the same function, but the most popular today are the following: 

  • Google bot:  The Googlebot is Google’s generic crawler and is responsible for crawling pages and content from the point of view of a computer, also known as desktop perspective.

  • Google bot Smartphone:  it is the version of Googlebot in charge of crawling pages from the perspective of mobile devices, such as tablets or smartphones.

How Google does this process

This process begins when Google is aware that a new website exists, which usually happens automatically, but you can speed up this process by manually sending the crawler robot from your website’s control panel in Google Search Console , indicating the URL of the page to crawl.  

After the new page has been detected, the crawler will begin its analysis process by browsing and detecting all its content and visiting all its links , thus establishing the title and the short description that will be displayed in the search results. 

In the event that the Google robot cannot crawl the page correctly , if it does not work properly or if it fails to comply with any of Google’s policies (either due to its content or poor functioning), it will not be indexed, so It will not appear in their search results and will negatively affect the SEO strategy of your entire website.   

Some errors that you should avoid before crawling your website so that Google completes this task correctly are:  

  • Reduce page loading time as much as possible, since this is a factor that greatly affects crawling.

  • Avoid complicated URLs that are difficult to reach.

  • Eliminate all errors with code 400 or 500, since these negatively affect the entire process and greatly influence SEO.

As you have seen, crawling is one of the fundamental parts of the SEO strategy of your web pages, so you must take it into account, avoiding errors in it so that all your pages are indexed correctly . This way you will make your website grow quickly and achieve success.