How Do Crawlability and Indexability Influence your SEO Efforts?

Businesses are discovering that SEO plays a big part in helping them get discovered by online visitors because it determines how many conversions they get from the websites. However, there are many factors that determine how SEO friendly the website will be for crawlers and most importantly for those visitors the online business is targeting. Today we look at two factors which are constantly overlooked as many websites are developed. But first, what is crawlability? What is Indexability?

Crawlability: Search engine bot’s ability to access content on a page within a website.

Indexability: Search engine’s ability to analyze and add a page to its index.

A page has crawlability issues if search engine bots cannot access all the content on the website by following the links within the pages. Also, if a page has internal linking issues then all the pages will not be accessible easily.

What affects Crawlability and Indexability?

1. Website Structure: The main website pages should all be linked to and from anywhere on the website. This makes it easy for search engine bots to access all the website content within a very short time. Website pages should also be linked to other relevant and authoritative but related website pages.
2. Internal Linking: Search engine bots crawl through the web by following links through the web. They only find pages which are linked appropriately since on the web everything needs to be interrelated. Poor structure on the website sends bots to dead ends resulting in crawlers missing out on content. For example, if you have a blog post that mentions a topic you have written about before, it is advised that you hyperlink the topic within your new blog. This shows the bots that your website content is interrelated and makes it easier for them to crawl your website pages. Ideally, your pages should have hyperlinks to content within your website and also to other authoritative websites on the internet.
3. Broken page redirects & server errors: No one likes to load a page that leads to an error. This is bad user experience. Online users bounce from websites such as these within a heartbeat. It is absolutely the same for crawlers, the moment they detect broken pages, they do not crawl your website content causing your search rankings to lower.
4. Unsupported tech used: Some tech used on websites is outdated and is not crawlable by search engine bots. This includes JS and Ajax which block content from being viewed by crawlers. It is imperative that as developers, all the content that is on the website is not hidden using outdated programming languages. It is imperative to learn how to code for the web using current technologies.
5. Crawler access blocks: Some pages do not need to be seen by online visitors. In this case, you can block access by robots. However, sometimes you may have a simple error in your code that prevents access to robots. This article guides you on to make sure that you have not blocked robots from accessing your website.

How do you make your website easier to crawl and index?

1. Sitemap submission: A sitemap enables the crawlers to know how many pages a website has in entirety. Submitting the sitemap regularly makes search engine bot aware of new additions search engines so that they make sure they crawl the pages appropriately.
2. Regular content updates: You need to update your website content frequently and consistently. Crawlers visit websites where content is relevant and fresh. If you ever view news websites, part of the reasons they rank pretty well on search engines is that they publish fresh content every day. This helps them get crawled frequently, thus assisting them to improve their overall rankings.
3. Avoiding duplicates: Crawlers detect duplicates really fast since they have already crawled similar content. This makes them not crawl the content since they assume that the content, though on a different website, has already been crawled. If your website has duplicated content from other websites, the crawlers do not bother to crawl through your website. If this is done on a very high level, none of your pages are crawled making it hard for them to rank appropriately.
4. Faster page load time: Every resource on the web has been allocated time in which crawlers have to go through the website. If your website is slow, the time elapses before all your resources have loaded, making them not crawl your site in entirety. If your site is not crawled frequently, it may not rank as high as you would want it to.
5. Strengthen internal links: It is advised that all the pages on the website are linked appropriately within the website and also without such that they are able to get link juice from appropriate authoritative websites.

I’d love to hear about how you make your website easier to crawl and index and your general views about crawlability and indexability of websites.