What is crawling in SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

There are various reasons why Google may not crawl or index your website, so the first thing you should do is fix those issues. Meanwhile, if everything is fine from your side, and yet no results, or you simply want to increase the crawl efficiency, here are the top 5 methods that absolutely work. 

Maintain your server for optimal responsiveness

Add a Screenshot from the Google Search Console

Keeping your server fast and reliable is super important. It should handle Googlebot’s crawling without making your slowing down your website or causing errors. 

Check-in Google Search Console that your site’s host status is good. It should say “host had no problems in the last XX days.

Also, make sure 5xx errors are below 1%, and server response times are consistently less than 300 milliseconds.

Remove unnecessary and redundant Content

When a significant part of your site’s contents are of low-quality, plagiarized, and old, it keeps search engines from finding new or recently updated stuff and makes the index too cluttered. Since Google runs on a crawl budget, there is a high chance the crawlers may not have enough time to crawl on your newly updated pages, instead, they will keep on indexing the same old content.

The quickest way to fix this is to go to Google Search Console and look at the pages that are “Crawled – currently not indexed.” 

If you find any errors, you can either fix them by combining the contents of two or more pages into one page or use a 301 redirect. 

If the contents are plagiarized or redundant, you should either replace them or remove them with a 404 error. 

Tell Googlebot not to crawl redundant pages

There are various ways to declutter your Google Index, including using rel=canonical links and noindex tags. With canonical links, you can redirect your non-functional or unnecessary links to healthy and relevant links. Meanwhile, with noindex tags, you can direct crawlers not to index the visited page. However, if both techniques work, it will still count in Google’s crawling budget. 

One way to completely stop Google from crawling a page on the first page is to use disallow tags in the robots.txt file.

Meanwhile, it is crucial to check your sitemap file as well. Check for pages that are “indexed, not submitted in sitemap”, or “discovered, not yet indexed” in Google search console.

Find and block non-SEO relevant routes such as:

• Parameter pages, such as ?sort=oldest.
• Functional pages, such as “shopping cart.”
• Infinite spaces, such as those created by calendar pages.
• Unimportant images, scripts, or style files.
• API URLs.

Also, check your pagination strategy, as it can impact your crawling efficiency.

You can tell Googlebot when and when to Crawl

While you cannot explicitly tell Googlebot when to crawl your website through XML sitemaps, you can use XML sitemaps to provide information about the structure and content of your site, which can indirectly influence how search engines crawl and index your pages.

Here are some key points related to XML sitemaps:

Frequency and Priority Tags:

You can include optional  and  tags for each URL in your XML sitemap. 

The  tag suggests how often the content at a particular URL is likely to change (e.g., “daily,” “weekly”). 

The  tag indicates the priority of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site.

Format

https://example.com/page1

 daily

 0.8

Keep in mind that search engines might not strictly follow these directives, but they can provide some guidance.

Last Modification Date:

Include the  tag to specify the last modification date of a page. This can help search engines understand when a page was last updated.

Format

https://example.com/page1

 2023-01-01