All You Need To Know About Site Crawlers

You are reading this article, which means you browse the internet for information and other purposes.

The most obvious thing you do to find information online is to type your query in a search engine box and hit enter. You get a list of the most relevant web page links in the blink of an eye.

But, have you ever thought about who does this thankless job for you?

How does the search engine provide you with the most relevant web pages as per your search query in just a fraction of a second?

Site crawlers crawl websites and make this possible for you.

This article is dedicated to tireless site crawlers, their working principles, and how to check your website’s crawlability to ensure higher rankings.

What Is A Site Crawler?

A site crawler is a software code that crawls websites, scans & analyzes the content of their web pages, and saves valuable information in a massive database.

Every search engine uses its own website crawlers to crawl websites, and the most widely used web page crawler is Google Bots. They are also known as ‘spiders’ and ‘crawlers’.

However, there are reliable third-party web page crawlers (We will provide you with the best one in the later part of this article) available, too, which can be used to enhance your website’s SEO. 

They can analyze the overall SEO health of your website and identify the technical SEO issues hampering your website’s rankings.

The Working Principles Of Site Crawlers

When you put your search query in search engines and press enter, you get a list of web pages that are most relevant to your search.

Practically, you are enjoying the benefits of site crawl.

The web page crawlers perform a complex algorithmic process to crawl websites. Web page crawlers are massive computer codes that find and scan information from the web and serve you with the best possible matches for your search query.

Website crawlers (we will primarily refer to Google bots) perform this massive task in the following steps,

1. First, these massive computer programs crawl your site.
2. After completing the site crawling, they scan the content on the sites’ web pages.
3. Then, they check the backlinks on the web page content and visit the pages where the backlinks are redirected to.
4. Next, they store useful information from crawler-friendly sites in a massive database called Google Index.
5. Google search engine then provides you with a list of relevant web pages matching your search query after running its ranking algorithms.

Have you noticed the word ‘crawler-friendly’ mentioned above on the fourth pointer?

That is not just a word; it is one of the essential requirements of a website crawl.

You must ensure your website is crawler-friendly so that Google bots can crawl and index it. Without that, your website can never rank on SERPs.

You can choose a reliable third-party crawler for the site to conduct a thorough site audit. That helps you identify and resolve your website’s SEO issues and ensure superior crawlability.

How Site Audit Tools Can Help?

If you wish to rank your website in search results pages, the first step is to ensure the bots crawl the site.

The bots need to crawl your site to be able to save valuable information in the index. 

If your web pages do not get indexed, they can never rank on the SERPs and drive organic traffic.

Of course, you can avail of the benefits of Google Ads and rank for paid results, but organic traffic is a symbol of the trustworthiness of your website to Google. 

That is why organic SEO is vital to your website’s rankings. Adding fresh content of top-notch quality and optimizing existing content helps increase your organic traffic.

However, you must check if any technical SEO issues are creating hindrances in crawling your website at regular intervals.

You can choose a reliable tool like the RankWatch site auditor to perform regular site audits to identify and resolve issues related to website crawling.

The tool can help you in the following ways,

1. The RankWatch website crawler analyzes the SEO health of your website by checking more than 100 SEO parameters and provides you an overall ‘Site Score’.
2. The RankWatch website crawler ensures the crawling of every web page to identify the issues.
3. The site crawler performs a micro-analysis of your URLs based on essential metrics like HTTP status, page load time, indexability, etc., and provides a comprehensive report.
4. The RankWatch site crawler also categorizes the SEO issues, considering their criticality, into three categories: high, medium, and low. That helps you to decide the issues that need to be resolved on a priority basis.
5. The advanced ‘Crawl Settings’ allows you to schedule crawls and set the crawl speed as per your preference.
6. The tool categorizes your web page URLs into three categories: Slow, Medium, and Fast, depending on their page response time.
7. The RankWatch site crawler identifies the web pages that are not indexed by the Google bots due to Robots.txt files, canonicalized, and wrong URLs.

How To Use The Site Audit Tool?

The user-friendly interface and ease of use make RankWatch site auditor one of the most efficient tools for website crawling.

You only need to follow a few simple steps:-

1. Log in to your RankWatch account and go to the dashboard.
2. Click on the ‘Site Auditor’ tab and enter the domain of your website.
3. Click the ‘submit’ button.
4. The site auditor summary dashboard will instantly generate a detailed crawled report showing the HTTP status code distribution chart and total site score. 

   

5. The HTTP status code distribution chart includes all the essential crawling stats like 200 pages, 301 redirects, failed URLs, and many more. 

   

6. The issues found in the site score chart are distributed in three categories; high, medium, and low, depending on their type of criticality. It helps you to decide which issues need to be addressed immediately. 

   

7. Scrolling down further will serve you the page depth of all your web pages. 

   

8. The tool also provides you with a page response time distribution chart showing the speed of all your URLs. You can easily identify the slow URLs and can start working on them to reduce the bounce rate. 

   

9. If you scroll down you will get the entire list of your non-indexable pages. This is crucial information and you need to re-work these pages without delay. 

   

10. You must conduct site audits at regular intervals and the tool allows you to choose that interval. You can select the crawl speed and schedule your site crawls from the ‘Crawl Settings’. 

How To Ensure Crawlability?

Once you resolve the technical issues identified by the RankWatch site auditor, you need to check the crawlability of your web pages.

If you have correctly resolved the issues, Google bots must be able to index your previously non-indexable web pages.

Copy all the URLs of those previously non-indexable pages and check their present indexing status using the RankWatch bulk index checker tool.

However, if your website is new, you must first submit it to search engines for website crawling and indexing.

Conclusion

Every website wants to rank higher on the search results—the more your website’s online visibility, the higher the chance of ranking.

The first step towards ensuring your website’s visibility is to make it easily crawlable by the site crawlers. An easy website crawling will help the site crawlers index your web pages and rank them for relevant searches.

Hence, you must ensure that your web pages are getting properly crawled and no technical issues are stopping you from ranking higher. The only way to ensure that is by crawling your website regularly using a reliable site audit tool.

That will easily allow you to identify and fix the issues creating hurdles against crawling your website and a higher ranking. 

Moreover, selecting a tool that categorizes the issues based on their criticality will be a further icing on the cake.