• 10/18/18
• imagine

Everyday, Google through their crawling bots, spider millions of websites. The crawling and indexing work has a huge impact on how your website ranks on search engine result pages (SERPs).

The closest you can associate a Google spider with is a celebrity manager trying to discover a singer’s talent and thereafter introducing them to record companies. Since the bot crawls many websites simultaneously, it is theoretically thought to have many legs and, therefore, known as the spider.

How Google Bots Work

In the world of search engine optimization, websites are divided into two broad categories; spider-friendly and non-spider friendly sites. Sites with relevant and quality links embedded on them are regarded as spider-friendly.

How the bot works is simple: it crawls only the links. Unlike humans, bots don’t require login details to access a page or site. If a website doesn’t have links, the Google spider will not see it let alone crawling it.

The Google algorithm and how Google spiders crawl websites is private information held by Google and, therefore, no one really knows how long the bots take to crawl a single website. The information available to the public domain is that the crawling doesn’t happen in real time, but the frequency is once every few seconds.

What Happens to a Crawled Site

When Google crawlers go through your site, they create a cache. These are basically screenshots that Google takes and keeps in its servers. Whenever a person searches for a certain term or keyword, Google refers them to the server where the screenshots are stored and displays the results.

The ranking of your website is also determined by the cache content and not the real-time content posted on websites. It is, therefore, logical not to expect any changes in rankings when you do one or two tweaks. It takes time for your ranking to adjust.

How to Determine Whether Your Site is Crawlable

There are a number of ways and tests you can carry out to determine if Google bots are indeed crawling your site. If you discover that your website is not crawled, check on the crawl errors page for details.

One of the issues that prevents crawling of sites is when you are running an AJAX application. Historically, these applications have proven difficult for search engines to process and, therefore, the content on AJAX applications is omitted by crawlers.

Google has several suggestions you can implement to make content on these applications crawlable. Remember, anything that is not crawled cannot be indexed.

Tips to Boost Your Site Crawlability and Ranking

To ensure Google doesn’t leave your site behind or a part of it when crawling the web, the following are some tips to factor in.

Backlinking to Internal Pages

Many people only link to their homepage with the belief that it will strengthen their SEO. This is not right because it only enhances the page authority of your homepage. When you link to internal pages as well, your domain authority increases, and you unleash your whole ranking power.

Internal Linking

When you do blog posts, ensure you link related content. The advantage of internal linking is that it uniformly spreads your ranking power on all the pages of your site. To boost crawlability of your site, go for deep interlinking. To enable Google to understand your site architecture well, make use of LSI keywords as anchor texts when doing your internal linking.

Create a HTML Sitemap

If you do not have a HTML sitemap, Google spiders find it difficult to classify the content on your site. With a sitemap, the content can be classified based on tags, categories, and many other criteria. The beauty with HTML sitemaps is that they are both user and Google readable.

Other measures you should consider are increasing page speed, making use of Robots.Txt to tell the spider what to crawl and not to crawl, and always avoid internal server error and 404 page errors.