Website crawling issues can make it become invisible online. Here's how to enhance your crawling efforts for Google and other search engines more effectively.
As a business owner, you invest in your website and can’t afford for it to be invisible online. Whether you’re familiar with search engine crawling or not, it’s critical for user discoverability. If Google and other search engines can’t find (crawl) and save (index) your site, neither will people when looking up information related to your business.
This step-by-step guide will show you how to crawl a website more effectively to promote a greater content marketing ROI.
Here’s how to crawl a website to make your content more discoverable by search engines.
Numerous factors impact your site’s crawling from search engines. You can check website crawlability by conducting a site-wide audit to uncover the potential issues that may prevent it from being crawled.
Below are the key metrics to monitor during your site audit and how to improve each for greater crawl accessibility.
Google crawlers have a time limit when crawling your site, known as a crawl budget. It’s determined for you and measured based on various factors, including your site size, number of URLs, total unique pages, content update frequency, and SEO health.
One of the most common crawlability problems businesses experience with their sites is a wasted crawl budget. From slow page load speed to duplicate content, these can make crawl bots take longer than necessary to discover your content from wasted time and confusing, redundant site structure.
You can check your site’s crawl rate on Google Search Console’s “Crawl stats” report to find its current budget. We’ll break down how to optimize your crawl budget based on common issues impacting them below.
Whether it’s repeating the same heading titles or page URLs, duplicate website content can cause crawlability issues. Not only can this waste your crawl budget, but it also can make search engine crawlers confused because they don’t know which version to save in their database for indexing.
You can discover if you have redundant website content with web crawler platforms like ScreamingFrog and SEMRush. These tools scan your entire site, including duplicate content, and will flag the exact areas for you to fix. You can correct this by updating your existing content so it’s unique or removing the pages altogether.
Search engines rely on crawlable links from your website. If it has many broken links, this can cause crawlability problems. Whether it’s a removed page that’s still being linked from other areas of your site, URL typos from a site migration during a website redesign, or 404 errors, these can make it less crawlable.
Check for broken links with tools like Google Search Console under the “Indexing” report or Screaming Frog during your site audit. They’ll flag the specific broken URLs and the reasons why—and they’re easy to fix!
The three main ways to fix broken links are:
While fixing broken links, you may make mistakes when redirecting them, resulting in redirect chains. These are caused by multiple redirects between the original link and the location it’s being sent to.
Redirect chains waste your crawl budget because crawl bots continuously follow this loop that never reaches its final page destination—resulting in unnecessary crawling time spent. Search engine crawlers may even stop following it and skip it, causing delayed or missed indexing for certain pages.
Like broken links, you can fix redirect chains by updating or removing them during your site audit and routine web maintenance.
If you aren’t familiar with canonicals, they direct search engine crawlers on which URL you want them to crawl and index from a duplicate page. While some duplicate content is normal, like international web domains and separate blog websites, many dated canonical URLs and tags can lead them to crawl the wrong ones, like older page versions, which waste your crawl budget.
URL inspection tools like Google Search Console flag harmful canonical URLs so you can remove them from your site.
If your website takes too long to load, this can also negatively impact your crawl budget. Your site’s below-average load speed uses more time to crawl each web page. As a result, your other web pages may not get crawled because your budget was prematurely spent. While sites differ in size, the optimal page load speed shouldn’t take more than three seconds.
You can check your site’s average loading times on PageSpeed Insights. All you have to do is copy and paste your website’s URL into Google’s free tool. It measures your website’s desktop and mobile load speeds and diagnoses performance issues impacting them, such as unused Javascript or CSS code.
You can improve your site’s page loading speed by:
That way, you can ensure your website has an efficient crawl rate and optimized crawl budget.
If your website has poor performance, this can cause crawlability issues. Your site’s health can be checked on Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals. These metrics measure your website’s overall performance for loading, responsiveness, and visual stability on mobile and desktop.
Don’t get discouraged if your site fails the Core Web Vitals test. Google will diagnose the areas of your website causing these issues with solutions to fix them, such as caching page content and improving site speed.
If you don’t know, a robots.txt file is a plain text tile that directs search engines how you want them to access and crawl your site. It’s like a recipe written in the language crawl bots understand so they know how to follow it.
As a tip, don’t include all your web pages in your robots.txt file that don’t require crawling. For example, shopping carts and staff directories typically don’t need to be crawled for users because they’re not intended for SEO and focus more on on-page user interaction.
Removing these unnecessary pages can optimize your crawl budget, so it prioritizes the ones you want while preventing your site from being overloaded with bot traffic requests.
In addition to providing robots.txt files, you must submit XML sitemaps to Google for efficient crawling. While robots.txt files are like a recipe, XML sitemaps are as the name suggests, a map of your site. It acts as a blueprint of your site structure for search engine crawlers to reference.
Even if you submitted an XML sitemap already, resubmitting it after content pages and new page creations is the best crawling practice. It gives crawl bots the most up-to-date version of your site so the right one is shown to users when searching for information related to your business online.
You can submit XML sitemaps on Google Search Console, and best done by web developers—especially if you don’t know how to crawl a website. While sitemap generators exist, web developers have the coding expertise to create them more accurately and prevent wasted crawl budgets due to structural errors.
Structured data helps search engine crawlers better understand your page’s content. Although you’re providing a robots.txt file and XML sitemap, structured data contextualizes your web pages to maximize their crawlability and online visibility from rich results in the SERP.
Rich results are unique features that stand out from the SERP’s standard blue links and textual elements, such as product feature carousels and images.
The most common types of structured data are:
You can test your web page for rich results on Google Search Console to ensure the structured data you implement are relevant.
SEO crawling is the process search engines use to discover your website. It’s the preliminary step before they save it in their database, known as indexing, so it shows your site content to users when using relevant search queries.
Web crawlers are the bots search engines use to discover your site so it becomes visible on their platform.
Web crawlers are search engine bots that use an automated process to find your site’s content so it can download it into their database (index) next. Search engines use web crawlers to retrieve your site’s information and display it to users when using queries relative to it.
Don’t let your website disappear. At Reach Marketing Pro, we’re a full-service digital agency with extensive experience in site-wide optimization for greater crawlability, indexation, and overall SEO performance. These include websites of all sizes and various CMS systems, like WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Dealer.com, and more.
Our team of SEO experts and web designers/developers can help you navigate the complexities of crawling. That way, you can improve your site’s performance and better support your bottom line.
Ready to maximize your site’s online visibility?
Learn more about our SEO and web design/development services, or contact us today!
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