What Are Google Crawlers?
Google Crawlers refers to the name of the automatically programmed internet robot that Google uses to find, review and track new content. It discovers new content through jumping from internal and external links. Google’s lead crawler is the Google Bot.
Why Are Google Crawlers Important?
Google crawlers are important because they determine what results will appear on SERPs.
A Google crawler will scour the web and find a web page. If it is an interesting and reliable web page, optimised for keywords, with good page navigation, it will have a higher crawl rate limit and a higher crawl demand.
This means it will be added to Google’s index more quickly, attract more traffic, and rank higher in SERPs.
Why Might Google Crawlers Not Crawl Your Website?
When you find out that Google isn’t crawling your site, it can be pretty worrying.
But don’t fly off the handle, simply find out why, and then amend the situation.
Here a few reasons why those creepy crawlies might not be interested in your site.
1. Your Page Isn’t Optimised For the Crawlers
Crawlers don’t go in blind; they are looking for certain things. This includes updated content, easy navigation (internal and external links), speed and load time, structured data and word to HTML ratio.
If your site is uncrawlable, because it doesn’t deliver on these factors, you won’t be indexed.
2. You’re Missing Vital Internal Links
Internal links are essential on a web page because they aid navigation and create an information hierarchy. If your website is missing internal links to important pages, they won’t be indexed, which means you will not rank for them. This means less traffic and that’s not good.
3. You’ve Been Removed From Google’s Index
This one’s tough. If you’ve been removed from Google’s index, this can indicate a few things, unfortunately none of them good.
If you’ve been behaving badly, employing black hat techniques to get ahead, you may have been flagged up manually, or via an algorithm (Panda or Penguin).
Due to this flagging, you may have been de-indexed altogether, or received a Google Penalty.
How Can You Increase Crawlability?
All things considered, it’s pretty clear that in order for your website to succeed, you need to make it as crawlable as possible. Below are some things you can do to increase your site’s crawlability.
- Produce high-quality content that is regularly updated
- To improve crawl rate limit, check your page’s speed – make it as fast as possible
- Include internal links for better navigation
- When using images on your site, include a focus key phrase, optimise and scale the image for better load time. Also be sure to add alt text and an alt title with the SEO keyword or phrase
- Create and submit a sitemap.xml to ensure that crawlers don’t get confused and miss indexing vital pages. Don’t forget to regularly update this
- Make your website mobile-friendly
How Can We Help?
Worried that the Google crawlers aren’t able to get the best of your website? You may have some issues that we could help you with.
Contact us today and we’ll pair you with a team that can take a close look at your site and set you off in the right direction.
In the meantime, why not head on over to our blog where you can learn about the latest in SEO and marketing.
