How do google crawlers work

It uses several user-agent strings to do so. Bing also has another crawler that specifically targets ads, called AdIdxBot. SEO efforts are designed to help websites gain visibility online. How do crawlers fit into the SEO narrative?

Without crawlers to scour online data and verify that certain content exists, all optimization efforts will be in vain. If you need help in making sure your web pages are being crawled, whether by Googlebot, Bingbot, Slurp, DuckDuckBot, or any other spider, get in touch with us. Markitors uses the information you provide to us to contact you about our relevant content, products, and services. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time.

For more information, check out our privacy policy. How Google Web Crawling Works. Vanessa Atan. May 5. Share on facebook. Share on twitter. Share on linkedin. Table of Contents. How Does Google Search Work?

Here are a few tips and suggestions in regard to optimizing your website for the Googlebot crawler:. The performance of your site within Google is a many-layered thing, and it is important to remember that Googlebot is always crawling. According to Google all websites are likely going to be crawled by both Googlebot Desktop and Googlebot Smartphone. Variations on its crawlers that are designed to collect different information for different devices. When Google announced mobile-first indexing for its index in , it meant that websites with mobile versions would have that version entered into its index by default — signaling to online businesses and websites that mobile traffic was becoming ever more dominant.

Google has sixteen different bots designed for various forms of site rendering and crawling. The truth is that for SEO you rarely ever need to set up your site differently for any of these. Each of these bots can be handled different using your robots. Optimizing for the Googlebot crawler helps ensure your website is being crawled and indexed both thoroughly and efficiently for the best possible results.

You're reading: What is Googlebot? What is Googlebot? But what is Googlebot? And how does Googlebot work in SEO? What is Googlebot crawling and indexing, and how does it affect my site? We take note of key signals — from keywords to website freshness — and we keep track of it all in the Search index. The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over ,, gigabytes in size. When we index a webpage, we add it to the entries for all of the words it contains.

To do this, we not only organize information about webpages but other types of information too. Today, Google Search can help you search text from millions of books from major libraries , find travel times from your local public transit agency , or help you navigate data from public sources like the World Bank. Even if your website has been converted to mobile-first indexing, you will still have some of your pages crawled by Googlebot Desktop, as Google wants to check how your website performs on desktop.

And Google hardly wants to lose this information by blindly following the mobile-first concept. How to know if Google crawls and indexes your website with mobile-first concept? Googlebot may have some troubles with processing and rendering the bulky code. As for JavaScript rendering , you should remember that JavaScript is a quickly evolving language, and Googlebot may sometimes fail to support the latest versions.

Make sure your JS is compatible with Googlebot, or your page may be rendered incorrectly. Mind your JavaScript loading time. If a script needs more than 5 seconds to load, Googlebot will not render and index the content generated by that script.

Note : If your website is full of heavy JavaScript elements, and you cannot do without them, Google recommends server-side rendering.

This will make your website load faster and prevent JavaScript bugs. Then go to the More Info section and click on the Page Resources and JavaScript console messages folders to see the list of resources Googlebot failed to render. Now you can show the list of problems to webmasters and ask them to investigate and fix the errors so Googlebot can render the content properly.

Nevertheless, the behavior of Google algorithms is not something that you can just do nothing about and hope for the best. If Google already knows your website, Googlebot will check your main pages for updates from time to time. Ideally, on the homepage. You can enrich your homepage with a block that would feature the latest news or blog posts, even if you have separate pages for news and a blog.

This would let Googlebot find your new pages much quicker. This recommendation may seem quite obvious, still, many website owners keep neglecting it, which results in poor indexing and low positions. In terms of crawling, backlinks work the same — Google will find your page faster if it is linked to from some credible and popular external page. You can try guest posting, launch an ad campaign, or try any other means you prefer to make Googlebot see the URL of your new page. Note : Links should be dofollow to let Googlebot follow them.

Just to make sure Google crawlers do see the page. Ideally, any page of a website should be reached within 3 clicks. Bigger click depth slows crawling down, and hardly benefits user experience. You can use WebSite Auditor to check if your website has any issues related to click depth. A good structure should be simple and scalable, so you could add as many new pages as you need without negatively affecting the click depth and preventing the Google crawler from successfully reaching the pages.

A sitemap is a document that contains the full list of pages you want to be in Google. A sitemap also tells Google if there are any updates on your pages. Note : Sitemap does not guarantee that Googlebot will use it when crawling your website. The crawler can ignore your sitemap and keep crawling the website the way it decides.

Still, nobody has been fined for having a sitemap, and in most cases, it proves to be useful. Consider submitting a sitemap if your website is new or big has more than URLs.