What is Google Crawling and Indexing?

SEO is a very big, deep sea. To fully understand SEO, we should know some basic SEO terms.

Crawling and indexing are two such terms.

If you have been in the web world for a while, you’ve at least heard the words: 

• Google Crawling and Indexing.

These are the two terms upon which the entire web world depends.

Let’s define, understand, and get some in-depth information about crawling and indexing.

Crawling:

• When Google visits your website for tracking purposes. This process is done by Google’s Spider crawler.

Indexing:

• After crawling has been done, the results get put onto Google’s index (i.e. web search).

What is Google Crawling?

Crawling basically means following a path.

In the SEO world, crawling means following your links and “crawling” around your website. When bots come to your website (any page), they follow other linked pages also on your website.

This is one reason why we create site maps, as they contain all of the links in our blog and Google’s bots can use them to look deeply into a website.

• The way we stop crawling certain parts of our site is by using the Robots.txt file.

What is Google Indexing?

In layman’s terms, indexing is the process of adding webpages into Google search.

Depending upon which meta tag you used (index or NO-index), Google will crawl and index your pages. A no-index tag means that that page will not be added into the web search’s index.

• By default, every WordPress post and page is indexed.

A good idea for ranking higher in search engines is to let only vital parts of your blog/website be indexed.

Do not index unnecessary archives like tags, categories, and all other useless pages.

Factors That Affect Crawling:

There are millions of websites on this earth. Is everyone satisfied with the crawling and indexing rate?? No!! Most people are left constantly wondering why their articles aren’t getting indexed.

Let’s take a look at some major factors which play some important roles at the backend of crawling and indexing. Domain Name

           1 . Domain Name

Since the Google Panda update, domain name importance has risen significantly. Domains that include the main keyword are given importance.

Also, the crawling rate is higher for those domains that have a good Page Rank.