What is Crawling?
Crawling is the process by which search engines discover new and updated pages on the internet. Search engines like Google use software programs called crawlers or spiders to follow links from one page to another, gathering information about content, structure, and metadata.
When a crawler visits a webpage, it reads the content and adds it to the search engine’s index if it meets the necessary criteria. This is the first step in getting a page to appear in search results.
Why Crawling Matters
If a page is not crawled, it cannot be indexed, and therefore it won’t appear in search results. Ensuring that your website is easily crawlable is a key part of technical SEO.
There are several factors that can affect crawling:
- Broken links or errors that block access to pages
- Robots.txt files that restrict crawler access
- Poor internal linking, making some pages hard to find
- Slow-loading pages that prevent complete crawling
- Duplicate content that reduces crawl efficiency
By making sure your site is well-structured and crawler-friendly, you help search engines discover and understand your content more effectively.
Example in Use
You publish a new blog post on your website. When Google’s crawler next visits your site, it follows the internal links or sitemaps to find that new page. If the page is accessible and meets quality guidelines, it will be crawled and may later be indexed.
Site owners can control crawling through settings like robots.txt files, noindex tags, or canonical URLs.