Crawling is the process by which a search engine, via a crawler (also known as a bot or spider, such as Googlebot), which automatically visits web pages and analyzes their content.
How to crawler explores the web
A crawler It starts with known URLs and then follows every link it encounters to new pages, thereby mapping out the web step by step. What a crawler What it finds and understands on a page determines whether and how that page will ultimately appear in the search results.
Controlling Crawlers
Two files largely determine how crawlers access a website:
- Robots.txt: Specifies which parts of the site may or may not be crawled.
- XML Sitemap: indicates which pages exist and their priority.
Crawl Budget
Large websites are subject to a crawl budget: the number of pages that a crawler visits within a certain period. A confusing site structure, lots of broken links, or unnecessary duplicate pages waste that budget on unimportant content, at the expense of the pages that really matter.
Are you unsure whether your website is being crawled properly? Get in touch or Schedule a strategy meeting.
« Back to Glossary Index