Googlebots (also commonly known as ‘spiders’) crawl your websites content and indexes pages of your website so when people search for the product or service you have to offer it shows up in Google’s index. Now if you’re familiar with how search engine bots work, you’d be familiar with terms like crawling and indexing, if not I will be explaining these concepts here and will be giving you tips on how to make Google bots crawl your website or blog more frequently.
First of all, what is crawling?
Crawling is basically a process in which a special type of algorithm is used to index the updated data on your website. The Google spider considers certain factors before crawling your website, factors like page rank, back links, the popularity of your website etc. Another way of getting the spiders to crawl your website is by generating a sitemap. However, the spiders will not crawl everything on your sitemap, it just lets Google know about your site’s content and can be submitted using search console (formerly known as webmaster tools). The spiders spend time crawling sites with significant page ranks. The amount of time a spider gives your site is called a ‘crawl budget’ and the higher the page’s authority the bigger the crawl budget it receives. The spiders first access your site’s robot. Txt files in order to find out rules about crawling your site and then uses the sitemap to discover any or all areas to be crawled and indexed.
What is Indexing?
This is what takes place after the spiders crawl your website. The googlebots then make an index of all the content they have crawled and this index is what you see when you make a search query. But wait it’s not that easy as before indexing your content Google looks at a few parameters to make sure that your content is trustworthy and unique, so make sure you write original content. The time Google takes to index your website’s pages may vary depending on how strong your interlinks, backlinks and frequency of content updates are.
Here are some tips to make sure that your website or blogs are being crawled:
Submit XML Sitemap
Your sitemap is one of the clearest messages to the googlebot about how to access your site. It serves as a map for the spiders to follow and can be submitted using search console. There are certain factors about the structure of your website that may confuse the spiders or sidetrack them from crawling your site. Submitting a sitemap will not only give the spiders a clear map to follow but will also reduce the time spent by the spiders on your site thus making it easier to Index.
Tip: Don’t forget about your no-follow links, if you’ve got duplicate content on your site use no follow links to keep the bots from crawling the duplicate content and penalising you.
Don’t get too fancy with your code
Googlebots don’t crawl DHTML, Ajax, Flash, Javascript, Frames content as well as they crawl HTML content and since the jury’s out on this you’re best off not consigning most of your important site elements and/or content into Ajax/Java Script.
Robot.txt
We’ve all heard that robot.txt files are important and its standard best practice for SEO, but why? Now we know that googlebots will spend its crawl budget on any pages of your site but you need to tell the googlebot where is should and shouldn’t spend its crawl budget. The robot.txt files do exactly this it tells the googlebots which parts of your website to crawl so that it doesn’t spend time on unnecessary sections of your site.
Fresh Content
When content is crawled more frequently it is more likely to gain more traffic. Although page rank is one of the most important factors in crawl frequency there’s a possibility that freshness factor might become more important for similarly ranked pages. The aim here is getting your low ranked pages crawled more often than the low ranked pages of your competitors. Thus, creating fresh content catches the attention of the googlebots.
Internal Linking
The more integrated and tight-knit your internal linking structure, the better googlebot will crawl your site. A good way to find out how well your internal linking structure is set up is by using search console – in the internal links section. If the content pages that you want to be returned in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) are on top of the list then you’re doing well. These content pages are the most important pages of your website.
Sharing content in the right places
Similar to the news, social news link submissions are indexed almost immediately and fade out of google’s index after a few days. However, if a particular social news link tops its category and goes viral it can get indexed permanently.
If you’re not already using social news sites like Reddit and Digg to get your content indexed, you’re missing out. It’s a great way to get your site indexed quickly.
If you enjoyed today’s content, consider checking out SEO Company Melbourne – we provide expert tips and content for all things SEO, as well as our expert SEO services.
