What Is Crawlability and Indexability for SEO?
Whenever you search something on Google you see some results on the top. These are not on the top by coincidence; they are there because of crawlability and indexability.
Now you must think about what is crawlability and indexability, Right? Crawlability is the capacity of a search engine to find and navigate through the content on your site. Search engines such as Google utilize automated bots, also known as crawlers or spiders, to browse websites and evaluate their content. These bots browse through links on web pages, gathering information to store in the search engine’s database. A website that is crawlable enables bots to navigate through its pages and assess how relevant it is to certain search queries.
Indexability, however, refers to the ability of crawlers to include discovered content in the search engine’s index. The index functions as an extensive library catalog that keeps data on all the websites that the search engine has explored. Once content is listed, it can show up in search engine results pages (SERPs) if users search for related keywords or phrases.
How Do You Know if Your Site is Indexed?
Determining if your website is included in search engine results is simple. You can perform a simple search using the site: operator followed by your domain name (e.g., site:yourwebsite.com) directly in the search engine’s search bar. This query will show you a list of all the pages from your site that have been indexed by that search engine. If your pages appear in the search results, it means they are indexed.
How Do You Get Your Site Pages Crawled and Indexed?
Now, let’s explore how you can ensure that your site’s pages are effectively crawled and indexed by search engines:
- Make a Sitemap: A sitemap is a document that shows all the pages on your site, helping search engine crawlers find and explore your content more efficiently. Submitting your sitemap to search engines like Google through Google Search Console can help ensure that all your pages are included.
- Maximize the Efficiency of Your Robots.txt File: The robots.txt file instructs search engine crawlers on which pages or files to crawl and which ones to avoid. It’s important to configure this file correctly to prevent crawling unnecessary or sensitive pages and to allow access to important content.
- Internal Linking: Linking your pages internally helps search engine crawlers find and index your content more effectively. Ensure that each page on your site is linked to from at least one other page, using relevant anchor text that includes keywords related to the page’s content.
- Quality Content & Metadata: Google prefers top grade and unique content and meta title and description that include the target keywords and help search engines to understand the relevance of your page. This increases the likelihood of them being indexed for relevant search queries.
- Monitor and Fix Errors: Regularly monitor your website’s crawl errors and index status using tools like Google Search Console. Quickly resolve any problems like broken links, server errors, or duplicate content to ensure your website is easily crawled and indexed.
- External Links & Social Sharing: Establishing external links from a reputable website signals to search engines that your site is reliable, boosting the speed at which Google crawls and indexes your site. External links serve as validations of the significance and credibility of your content.
Lastly, crawlability and indexability are the very important concepts that help to improve the site’s performance in the search engine results pages. By doing this correctly you can make your website trustworthy in the eyes of search engines. Once you have set this up correctly you can get the higher ranking in the shortest possible time.
