What is Crawling?

Crawling is the process search engines use to discover and scan web pages. Automated bots called crawlers (or spiders) follow links from page to page, reading content and storing information for indexing.

Google's main crawler is called Googlebot. It constantly browses the web, finding new pages and revisiting existing ones to check for updates. If your page isn't crawled, it can't be indexed or ranked.

Why crawling matters

If search engines can't crawl your pages, they won't show up in search results. Problems that block crawling effectively make your content invisible to search engines.

Even if your pages are technically crawlable, slow crawling or infrequent visits mean updates take longer to appear in search results. Popular, well-linked sites get crawled more often than new or isolated sites.

What affects crawling

Your robots.txt file tells crawlers which pages they can and can't access. Accidentally blocking important pages is a common mistake that prevents them from being crawled.

Internal links help crawlers discover all your pages. Orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them might never be found. Your sitemap also guides crawlers to important content.

Site speed and server performance matter. If your site is slow or frequently down, crawlers might give up or visit less often. Page speed affects both user experience and crawl efficiency.

How to improve crawling

Submit a sitemap to Google Search Console. This tells Google about all your important pages and helps ensure they get crawled.

Use internal links to connect all your pages. Every page should be reachable within a few clicks from your homepage.

Check your robots.txt file and make sure it's not accidentally blocking important content. Monitor Google Search Console for crawl errors and fix them promptly. Improve page speed to enable more efficient crawling of your site.