Search engine optimization (SEO) is really about making your website visible to search engines. But have you ever wondered how they get there at all? The answer lies in two factors: crawlability and indexability. It confuses many, and marketers often use the terms interchangeably, but they mean different things. Crawlability refers to how easily search engine bots can discover and navigate your site, while indexability is about whether the content is added to the search engine’s database. Together, they ensure your pages appear in search results.

Here is a quick guide explaining both terms.

What Are Crawlability and Indexability of a Website?

How do search engines work? Imagine the likes of Google and Bing as a massive library containing all the world’s information. A librarian’s job is to collect, organize, and make all this information accessible to anyone who needs it.

Similarly, the search engine’s job is to discover, understand, and index all the content on the Internet so that people can find it easily when needed. When they type their query, such as “SEO Agency in New York USA,” into the search box, they expect to see a list of relevant results in seconds. However, for this to be possible, the search engine should first find all the web pages. That’s where web crawling comes into play.

What Is Web Crawling?

The other name for web crawlers is web spiders or bots. These programs browse the Internet looking at websites and reading and indexing their content. They pick up links on the pages and then send all that information back to their search engine servers.

Search engines start by crawling pages and then updating pages. Whenever a spider visits a website, it will then scour for new data. If it finds any pages, it will then add them to its index. Web crawling is just like wandering around inside of a maze. We aim to get out there, but the conditions are full of dead ends and wrong turns.

By focusing on your site’s crawlability, you can help search engines to do their job. This relates to how well and easy a crawler can crawl and crawl over the content of your page. The bots don’t encounter such hiccups while crawling the pages on your site, and they don’t return error codes or are unable to follow broken links, meaning, bots crawl your site, so this site is crawlable.

What Is Indexability?

The part of the crawl where search engine bots process the content they’ve found refers to indexability. A crawler has the power to compile the content it finds and adds it into the search engine’s index. This is information that all the web crawlers have been collecting and stored in the index. Indexability is a crucial aspect of search engine optimization (SEO). When search engine bots crawl a website, they process the content they find and add it to the search engine’s index. This index is a vast database of web pages that the search engine uses to retrieve relevant results when users perform a search. 

Ensuring high indexability means that your content is easily discoverable and ranked appropriately based on its relevance and usefulness. Recent advancements like IndexNow allow webmasters to notify search engines about content updates in real-time, improving indexing efficiency and ensuring that the latest content is quickly reflected in search results.

4 SEO Tips to Increase Crawlability and Indexability.

Crawlability and indexability are two produced processes. Bots can crawl your page, but just because they can doesn’t mean they will and vice versa. Digital experts say that sometimes you need to stop your site from spidering specific parts of your website. Pages can range from low quality, outdated and thin content. In general though, you want to have your site is crawlable and indexable as possible. 

Here are four SEO tips to help you:

1. Enhance Your Technical SEO

Aim to improve only one thing in the list and that’s your technical SEO. Technical SEO is all about the behind the scenes stuff that search engine bots need to be able to easily discover, read, and index your content.

You can refine it in these ways:

1. Create an XML sitemap: An XML sitemap is just like a table of contents for your site. It contains all of your pages links and tells search engine bots which pages are the most important. By using a sitemap generator tool or manually adding code to your site’s robots.txt file you can create one. When you get it, just publish to Google Search Console.
2. Take paying attention to site arches: It’s either going to help or hinder how your website is crawled. A good site structure also makes it simple for bots to locate and discover all the pages on your site. Grouping similar topics together creates an effective site structure. For example, post all your posts of keyword research under one category.
3. Speed up page load time: The reason that search engines have defined limits on how long they will stay at a Web site is that they don’t want to waste time dealing with what are often bloated pages. As soon as they meet their budget they quit. That means the faster your pages load, the more pages the bots crawl, and for more chances to be indexed. With Google’s Page Speed Insights you can test page speed, and it tells you what’s wrong with your pages to improve. 

2. Strengthen Your Links

Crawling is a resource-intensive task. If your website is cluttered with links to low-quality sites or broken pages, it can quickly exhaust your crawl budget without yielding any valuable results. 

To enhance your link-building strategies, consider these steps:

• Audit Your Links: Regularly check the condition of your links to ensure they are not broken or dead. Utilize a backlink checker tool to analyze your link profile and eliminate any invalid links. Fix 404 errors by using redirects or removing the pages altogether.
• Selective Disavowal: Rather than disavowing all spammy links, focus on those that are paid-for or unnaturally acquired. Many marketers hastily disavow links, fearing they will harm rankings. However, it’s more prudent to disavow only those links you know were obtained through unnatural means (e.g., purchasing backlinks). This approach saves time and effort while maintaining the integrity of your site’s link profile.
• Implement Link Monitoring Tools: Using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush can automate the process of tracking the health of your backlinks. These tools notify you of any broken or suspicious links, allowing for swift action to maintain the quality of your site’s link profile.

Strengthening your links is crucial for maintaining an efficient and effective crawling process, ultimately boosting your website’s SEO performance.

3. Use Robot.txt Files

Robot.txt files are essential for guiding search engine bots on which pages they can and cannot crawl, helping to minimize duplicate content. You can create these files using a text editor like Notepad or TextEdit, and then upload them to the root directory of your website (e.g., www.example.com/robots.txt).

Common Instructions for Robot.txt Files:

• Sitemap: Directs the bot to your XML sitemap. Including the full URL of your sitemap ensures that the bot can easily find it. For example:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

• Allow/Disallow: Specifies which folders or pages bots can access. If you want to prevent Google from crawling a specific page, you can add the following code:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /page-to-hide/

• Crawl-Delay: Indicates how long the bot should wait before crawling a specific page. This is useful for pages that are frequently updated or if your server cannot handle too many crawls at once:

Crawl-delay: 10

Advanced Tips:

• User-Agent Specific Directives: Customize instructions for different bots by specifying user-agents individually, such as Googlebot, Bingbot, etc. This allows more granular control over your site’s crawl behavior.

User-agent: Googlebot

Allow: /public-page/

Disallow: /private-page/

• Blocking Resource-Intensive Elements: Use the robot.txt file to block resource-heavy elements like large images or script files that are not essential for indexing.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /images/large/

Disallow: /scripts/heavy.js

• Testing and Validation: After setting up your robot.txt file, use tools like Google Search Console to test and validate the file to ensure it’s correctly implemented and doesn’t inadvertently block important pages.

Implementing robot.txt files effectively ensures that search engines crawl your site efficiently, enhancing your website’s SEO performance.

4. Create New or Update Content Regularly

Writing fresh or updated content regularly is one of the best ways to keep search engine attention and ensure your website is still relevant. Adding new content regularly to search engines tells them that your site is active and helping people locate the content they want.

The frequency of updates vary on many factors. For example, such may be the news website that has to put out many stories daily to remain up to date and provocative. Some blogs may thrive with one or more really well crafted posts each week, and conversely some blogs may fit best with one well crafted post per day. Consistency and top quality content is the key.

You can also build your content strategy around current trends and feedback from the audience. Moreover, this approach not only preserves your content relevance but also lures users and search engines back to read your content repeatedly. However, For this, you can use tools like content calendars that will help you plan, and maintain a regular posting schedule to keep your website lively and engaging.

Final Words

Crawlability and indexability are the foundation of good SEO. With this, you have made your website easily accessible to search engine crawl bots, as well as successfully indexed your content, which greatly enhances your chance of being seen in putative search results. By following the tips outlined above, you’ll be able to improve your website’s crawlability and indexability which should help improve your SEO performance and get more organic traffic.

FAQ

1. What’s the difference between crawlability and indexability?

• Crawlability refers to how easily search engine bots can access and navigate your website.
• Indexability determines whether search engines can include your website’s content in their search results.

2. Why is a high crawl budget important?

A high crawl budget signifies that search engines can crawl more pages on your website. This is crucial for ensuring all your valuable content gets discovered and indexed.

3. How often should I update my website content?

The ideal content update frequency depends on your website’s niche. News websites may require daily updates, while blogs might thrive with weekly or bi-weekly high-quality content. Consistency and quality are key.

4. What are some tools that can help with crawlability and indexability?

• Google Search Console: Test and validate your robot.txt file and monitor website health.
• Page Speed Insights: Analyze page loading speed and identify areas for improvement.
• Backlink checker tools: Analyze your link profile and identify broken or spammy links.
• Content calendar tools: Plan and maintain a consistent content creation schedule.