High-quality search engine optimization (SEO) helps you improve your rankings, but technical search engine optimization, especially Googlebot optimization, goes a step further.
Optimizing your website for Googlebot is essential. Here are some tips and tricks to help you achieve optimal Googlebot optimization.
Googlebot is the name given to Google's web crawler, which collects information for various Google services, including its search index.
There are two main versions: Googlebot Desktop and Googlebot Smartphone. With mobile-first indexing, Googlebot Smartphone became the primary crawler that powers the Google search index.
Googlebot continuously crawls the web to discover new pages, sends the pages for processing to add them to the search index, and re-searches pages for new/updated information.
During this process, Googlebot strictly follows the rules in robots.txt files and directives for crawlers on pages and links. Well-structured internal linking can help Googlebot crawl and index a website more effectively.
It is important to ensure that your internal linking is logical and organized so that both Googlebot and users can easily access all the important pages of your website.
Googlebot is one of the most important tools that powers the entire Google search engine. Without Googlebot, the entire search function (and therefore SEO) would not exist. If Googlebot does not crawl a website, it will not be indexed and will not appear in the search results.
Therefore, SEO professionals and webmasters need to understand how Googlebot works. Furthermore, it's important to ensure that the crawler can properly crawl the website without encountering crawlability or discoverability issues.
If you want Googlebot to properly crawl and index your website, you need to ensure certain things are in place. Since this isn't a one-time event, here are some best practices that should be followed regularly to maintain a crawl-friendly website.
The robots.txt file on your website allows you to control what gets crawled. It communicates with bots using crawler directives.
You need to ensure that your robots.txt file does not prevent Googlebot from crawling the pages/sections of your website that you want to have indexed.
Next, use robots.txt testing tools to check the file for errors.
Make sure that the robots.txt file is accessible to Googlebot, meaning that it is not blocked at the server level.
Submitting sitemaps is the easiest way to tell Google which pages should be crawled and indexed.
If you use a popular SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math on WordPress, creating sitemaps is no problem. They automatically generate sitemaps that you can submit.
To manually submit a sitemap URL, visit Google Search Console and click on «Sitemaps» under the «Index» section in the main menu.
In addition to the robots.txt file, there are page-specific instructions that tell crawlers which pages are allowed to be crawled (or not).
Therefore, you must ensure that the pages you want indexed do not have a "noindex" directive. At the same time, ensure that they do not have a "nofollow" directive if you want their outbound links to be crawled as well.
You can use our free SEO toolbar for Chrome and Firefox to check the instructions on your pages.
Another simple way to index a page faster is to link it to an already indexed page. Since Googlebot recrawls pages, it will quickly find and crawl the internal link.
In addition to crawling, internal linking transfers so-called "link juice" to the pages and increases their PageRank.
Finally, you can use Ahrefs' Site Audit Tool to find issues related to indexability and crawling on your website.
Site auditing can help you find broken pages, excessive redirects, redirect chains, noindex pages, nofollow links, orphan pages (pages without internal links), and more.
You can monitor the SEO health of your website with the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
SEO – improving your website for better rankings – requires that pages are accessible and readable for web crawlers. Crawling is the first way search engines discover your pages, but regular crawling also helps them see changes you make and keep your content up-to-date.
Since crawling extends beyond the beginning of your SEO campaign, you can view the behavior of web crawlers as a proactive measure to help you appear in search results and improve the user experience.
Read on to learn more about the relationship between web crawlers and SEO.
Ongoing web crawling gives your newly published pages a chance to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs). However, Google and most other search engines do not allow unlimited crawling.
Google has a crawling budget that directs its bots to:
It's good that there's a crawling budget. Otherwise, the activity of crawlers and visitors could overload your website.
If you want your website to run smoothly, you can adjust web crawling by limiting the crawl rate and the crawl demand.
The crawl rate limit monitors how content is retrieved from websites to prevent it from impacting loading times or causing an increase in errors. You can change this in Google Search Console if you're experiencing problems with Googlebot.
Crawl demand is the level of interest that Google and users have in your website.
So if you don't yet have a large following, Googlebot won't crawl your website as often as highly popular websites.
There are several ways to selectively prevent web crawlers from accessing your pages. Not every page of your website should rank in the SERPs, and these crawler blocks can protect sensitive, redundant, or irrelevant pages from appearing for keywords.
The first block is the "noindex" meta tag, which prevents search engines from indexing and ranking a specific page. It is generally advisable to use noindex for admin pages, thank-you pages, and internal search results.
So, what are some examples of web crawlers? Popular search engines all have a web crawler, and the large ones have several crawlers with specific focuses.
Google, for example, has its main crawler, Googlebot, which covers mobile and desktop crawling. But there are also several additional bots for Google, such as Googlebot Images, Googlebot Videos, Googlebot News, and AdsBot.
Here are some other web crawlers you might come across:
Bing also has a standard web crawler called Bingbot and more specialized bots like MSNBot-Media and BingPreview. The main crawler used to be MSNBot, but it is now only used for minor website crawling tasks.
Analyzing Googlebot's performance is relatively simple and accessible compared to other search engine SEO bots. You can use platforms like Google Webmaster Tools to gain valuable insights into how Googlebots are performing on your website.
All you need to do is log in to Google Webmaster Tools and click "Crawl" to check all the relevant diagnostic data. Here are the features of the Webmaster Tools that you should regularly check and analyze:
How often Googlebot crawls a website depends on several factors. The PageRank value of the relevant page, the number of existing backlinks, and their quality are very important.
The loading time, structure, and frequency of content updates on a website also play a role in how often Googlebot visits the site. A page with many backlinks can be read by Google every 10 seconds, while a website with few links might not be crawled for weeks.
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