How Google Crawler Works: SEO Starter-Pack
Search engines are machines that are designed to meet search intent by providing the most relevant available answers to user questions.
They exist to discover and organize information on the internet based on the pages and websites visible to them. Through its web crawling function, Google analyzes online data and indexes and ranks results based on relevance on search engine results pages (SERPs). It is, however, imperative that you provide search engines with something to crawl if you want your page or website to appear on SERPs.
You will learn how Google crawlers work in this article and how to incorporate them into your SEO strategy.
How Does Google Search Work?
To have a better understanding of web crawlers’ search engine “behavior”, we should look into how Google Search generates web page results. The three steps that Google follows are crawling, indexing, and serving.
1. Crawling
A Google website crawl is the process by which the search engine retrieves updates to a website using bots (also called spiders). Various sources of information can be accessed via links, including videos, images, PDF files, and more. You can start networking on a known page (like your home page) or through a sitemap.
2. Indexing
When Google finds a page, it tries to understand what it’s about and stores the information (Google index). This process is called indexing.
3. Serving/Ranking
Whenever a query is entered into the search box, Google then finds the highest quality answers. It ranks them in order of relevance, and then serves them as a list called SERPs. The pages that appear on this list are ranked based on whether they offer the most accurate answers while considering other ranking factors like language, location, and device used (mobile or desktop).
How to Ask Google to Crawl Your Website
When you create a brand-new website, Googlebot (the generic term for both its desktop and mobile crawlers) will find it. This bot mimics a user’s behavior on a computer or smartphone and crawls forward via a natural progression of hyperlinks that move from one page to another. What does Google crawl? Through text, images, videos, PDF files, and more — so be sure that all the content on your pages is properly optimized.
You do not pay Googlebot to crawl your site or do it faster. Whoever tells you otherwise is providing false information. However, you can help Googlebot discover and index your website more quickly from your end via three steps:
Create a sitemap.
Sitemaps are documents that website owners and developers prepare for search engines, providing directions for crawling. Upload this file to your root directory. If you use WordPress, you can install the Google Sitemap Generator or use websites like xml-sitemaps.com to generate a sitemap.
To submit your website for consideration and your sitemap, visit Google Webmaster Tools.
Then go to the Webmaster Tool URL to ask Google to index your site. Since search engines crawl and index every URL they come across, if a URL is not a text file (such as a video, audio, or an image file), it won’t likely be read unless the filename and metadata are relevant. In spite of the limited amount of data extracted from such file types, what the bot finds can still affect indexing and ranking.
