When it comes to technical SEO, crawlability is the foundation to your website's SEO health. It is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle when it comes to your online marketing efforts, a piece that is often overlooked and misunderstood.
Having your pages crawled is an important factor in technical SEO, helping your pages to appear in the search results and thus, allowing your site to receive organic traffic. Understanding the importance of crawlability is essential for any website owner or digital marketer aiming to achieve optimal search engine rankings.
In this blog, we will delve into the significance of crawlability in technical SEO, exploring the difference between crawlability and indexability, the importance of a crawl budget and some of the different factors that impact a website's crawlability.
What is crawlability?
When we talk about crawlability, we're referring to the ability a search engine, such as Google, has to crawl your website and what access it has to web pages. These bots "crawl" through web pages, following links and gathering information to index them in search engine databases. In terms of Google, there is the Google Bot which is their search engine crawler which is tasked with crawling website pages before indexing them.
A website with good crawlability ensures that search engines can easily discover and understand its content. Crawlability is like building a bridge between your website and search engines. Without a well-built bridge, search engine bots may struggle to access and understand the content on your website, leading to poor indexing and rankings.
Difference between crawlability and indexability
Crawlability and indexability go hand in hand. Indexability refers to a search engine's ability to be able add a web page to their index. It's the next crucial step in technical SEO, and a search engine cannot index a web page without being able to crawl it first. Once a search engine is able to crawl and index different pages, it then allows it to rank the pages for the relevant search queries.
However, it’s important to note that not all pages that have been crawled will necessarily be indexed. You may see a ‘crawled – currently not indexed’ status on Google Search Console, meaning the page has been crawled but not indexed and as a result, it will not appear in the search results yet.
Unfortunately, it’s not always completely clear as to why this happens. Saying this, there are a few common reasons that can more than likely be deduced from the website including low quality or thin content, canonicalisation Issues, duplicate content issues, noindex tags or no internal or external links. If you find that this is happening to you, a technical SEO audit of your website can often uncover any missed issues that are causing this.
Importance of crawl budget
Search engine bots have a finite crawl budget, which means they can only crawl a certain number of pages within a given time frame. Crawl budget is determined by various factors, including a website's authority and overall performance. Optimising crawlability helps ensure that search engines prioritise crawling your most important pages, enhancing their chances of being indexed and ranked.
To maximise your crawl budget, focus on improving site performance, fixing broken links, and avoiding duplicate content. These steps will encourage search engine bots to spend more time on your website, indexing the pages that matter most.
What impacts crawlability?
This is where things can start to get a little more complex, as there are many different aspects of technical SEO that can impact a website's crawlability. Let's take a look at some of these factors:
Site structure
Site structure, also referred to as site architecture, is the hierarchy of web pages that exist on your website. When search engines crawl a website, they want to be able to move between web pages with ease.
A good site structure applies a logical path between all pages, ensuring every web page is only a few clicks away from the homepage. For example, in e-commerce websites, the homepage should link to different category pages and then to the individual pages.
Having a sound structure benefits both crawlers and users, allowing both to more easily navigate your website. For search engine crawlers, a well-structured site ensures that all pages can be discovered and indexed efficiently, boosting your website's chances of ranking higher in search results.
Simultaneously, a clear and user-friendly site structure enhances the overall user experience, as visitors can quickly find the information they are seeking, reducing bounce rates and increasing engagement.
Internal links
Having a solid site structure is essential, and when a website has this it's easier for search engines to logically move from one page to another. Once you have a site structure in place that you're happy with, it's then important to start thinking about creating a solid internal link structure that is easy to follow and makes logical sense.
Think of internal links as a roadmap for search engine crawlers to follow. If you were asked to explore a city that you've never been to before with a map that pointed in all sorts of different directions, you're bound to get lost. As well as this, you'll also miss out on all the important points of interest and even if you find them you'll have no idea what they are and how important they are. The same thing goes for your website and search engine crawlers.
Internal links allow search engines to crawl different pages, and the more logical internal links there are, the easier it will be for them to crawl and then index pages. Keeping up to date with your internal linking helps to ensure that crawlers are easily able to find any new pages that you might have created since it was last crawled, helping those new pages to rank in the SERPs.
Doing this also ensures that you do not end up with any orphan pages. These are pages that have no internal links pointing to them, resulting in search engines having no way to find them which negatively affects crawlability. To improve the crawlability and indexability of your site and improve your overall technical seo, you need to strengthen internal links.
Broken links
We spoke about the importance of having a solid structure of internal links, and a key part of this is also fixing the broken internal links you may have on your site. These appear as 404 errors, which happens when a page is deleted or it is moved without a redirect having been set up.
Having broken links can have a direct impact on website crawlability, as bots following links to a dead end, stopping them from being able to crawl pages and content that exists on your site.
XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is essentially a map of your entire website and it plays a very important role in your site's crawlability. Instead of leaving it up to the crawl bots to crawl and index the many different pages of your site, you can submit a sitemap to Google which will show all of the important pages you want crawled and indexed.
This is especially useful for crawling when you may have certain web pages that otherwise might be hard to find, but you still want to be crawled and indexed. It's like providing a helping hand to Google to help them rank your pages in the SERPs.
Robots.txt file
When web crawlers first land on your website, the first thing they'll check for is a robots.txt file. This is a protocol that can block crawlers from crawling specific pages on your site. By adding this, you tell crawlers which pages they can and cannot crawl.
You may want to block certain pages from being crawled if they have duplicate content on them or pages that you simply don't want to rank or if a page can overload a server.
When using this protocol, it's very important not to block other pages that have important content on them that you wanted crawled and indexed. Remember when we spoke about the crawl budget earlier? This is where robots.txt file can come in very handy. If there are pages you know you don't want crawled, you can use this to stop your crawl budget from being wasted on pages that you don't want crawled.
However, it is important to point out that whilst robots.txt file can stop a page from being crawled, it doesn't stop it from being indexed. Incoming links can still result in certain pages being indexed.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content issues arise when multiple pages have the same content existing on them. This causes crawlability issues because search engine bots get confused between which content they should crawl and index. As well as this, duplicate content can result in a waste of your crawl budget.
Regularly optimising and adding new content
It is important to regularly update and add new content to your website in order to improve both your crawlability and indexability. When a search engine sees that your site is constantly updating its content, be it optimising current content that already exists or adding fresh, helpful content, it tells the search engine that your site is very much alive and well.
Mobile-friendliness
To enhance crawlability and SEO performance, ensure your website is mobile-friendly by adopting a responsive design and optimising images for mobile. In fact, data shows that mobile device website traffic now accounts for 58.33% of overall web traffic at the start of 2023.
It's because of this that Google introduced mobile-first indexing in 2020, where they prioritise the mobile version of your website when indexing pages. This means that websites that are mobile-friendly are more likely to rank higher in the SERPs than websites that are not optimised for mobile.
Conclusion
Crawlability plays a vital role in ensuring a website's content is discovered, indexed, and displayed on search engine result pages. By following these steps, you can help to improve crawlability, indexing and in turn boost your website's chances of appearing high in the search engine results.
If you're unsure of your site's SEO health, we offer a free audit of your website to identify any crawlability issues and help you get on your way to having a healthier, higher-ranking website.
