In layman’s terms to “crawl” means to follow a path. Crawlers are simply the agent who collects the information on the web. In technical terms crawling means following the links on the World Wide Web and gathering relevant data.
Once we create our website or blog over the webserver, the crawlers or spiders or Google’s GoogleBot will automatically crawl your website within 10 days. The crawlers take snapshots of your webpage & other important information for eg. Keywords, domain name, location, and other links provided on the site. They collect all the information & pass it on to the main program.
There are many factors that affect crawling:
Domain Name: the importance of domain name has raised significantly as the main keywords are given importance. The crawling rate of the domains that have a good page rank is higher than the other domains.
XML Sitemap: from the moment we set up a site in WordPress, we are advised to use an XML sitemap so that our sitemap can be auto-generated. In this way, Google will be informed that your site has been updated and will want to crawl it.
Backlinks: the more backlinks you have, the more trustworthy & reputable you are in the eyes of the search engine. If you have good rankings but aren’t earning any backlinks for your site, the search engine may assume that you have low-quality content.
Internal linking: there have been so many discussions regarding internal linking or deep linking. Using the same anchor text within the same article helps in the deep crawling of the website. Internal linking is a good practice for maintaining active users on your website.
Duplicate Content: for better crawling avoid duplicate content on your website as it might make Google ban in the future owing to repeated paragraphs spread through different posts.
Meta Tags: having a unique & non-competitive Meta tag for your website will ensure that you have a top ranking in search engines.
Pinging: make sure that you have added all of the main ping sites to your WordPress site which has an auto-pinging feature to inform search engines about your website’s updates.
When we optimize our website based on these factors, Google will have no choice but to crawl your page faster & more accurately.
How do search engines crawl web pages?
The search engine crawlers begin crawling a website by downloading its robots; txt file which contains information about sitemap. This is one of the reasons why we create sitemaps, as they contain all the links in our blog hence Googlebot can use them to look deeply into a website.
The search engine crawlers use several algorithms & rules to predict how frequently a page should be crawled or how many pages on a site should be indexed.
As you see a page that changes or updates regularly may be crawled more than the one’s rarely modified.
E.g. – the keyword of a specific blog is “Marie Curie”. The crawler would gather information throughout the web about Marie Curie along with all the other existing web pages in Google’s database carrying the same keyword.
Now let’s take an assumption that the main program found out, there are 12,345 webpages including your webpage in Google’s database that contains the same keywords- “Marie Curie”. In this case, the main program will evaluate your webpage with the rest of the displayed webpage.
There are two broad parameters for evaluation-
- Quantity of the content meaning how descriptive the content is we provide on the particular keyword.
- Quality of the content meaning how informative & relevant the content on a particular keyword is.
Hence for your website to stay in the limelight of search engines one should keep in mind these factors.