What is Crawling Tutorials
Digital Marketing
<h2>What is Crawling</h2>
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<p>Crawling is the process where search engine bots like Googlebot, Bingbot, and other search engine crawlers visit websites to discover new and updated webpages. They collect information about the content, images, videos, links, and other elements available on each page.</p>
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<p>You can think of Crawling as the first step of SEO because if a search engine cannot discover your webpage, it cannot move to the next steps.</p>
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<p>Search engine bots keep visiting websites regularly to check whether new pages have been published or existing pages have been updated.</p>
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<h2>Why is Crawling Important</h2>
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<p>Crawling is important because it helps search engines discover your website. Without Crawling, your webpages cannot move to the Indexing stage and if they are not indexed, they cannot appear in search results.</p>
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<p>This is why every website should be easy for search engine bots to access and understand.</p>
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<h2>How Crawling Works</h2>
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<p>A search engine sends its bot to visit a website.</p>
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<p>The bot starts from one webpage and follows internal and external links to discover other pages.</p>
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<p>It reads the content, images, headings, links, and other important information available on each page.</p>
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<p>After collecting the information, the bot sends it to the search engine for Indexing.</p>
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<p>This entire process happens automatically.</p>
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<h2>Real Life Example</h2>
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<p>Imagine a delivery person has to deliver parcels in a new city.</p>
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<p>Before delivering anything, the delivery person first visits every street and notes down all the house numbers.</p>
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<p>Only after collecting this information can the parcels be delivered to the correct houses.</p>
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<p>Search engine bots work in a very similar way. They first discover webpages before storing them in the search engine database.</p>
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<h2>What Can Stop Crawling</h2>
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<ul>
<li>Blocking pages through Robots.txt</li>
<li>Broken internal links</li>
<li>Poor website structure</li>
<li>Pages with no internal links</li>
<li>Slow website speed</li>
<li>Server errors</li>
</ul>
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<h2>Best Practices</h2>
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<ul>
<li>Create a clear website structure</li>
<li>Use proper internal linking</li>
<li>Submit an XML Sitemap in Google Search Console</li>
<li>Keep important pages accessible</li>
<li>Regularly check for crawl errors</li>
<li>Update your website with fresh content</li>
</ul>
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<h2>Common Mistakes</h2>
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<ul>
<li>Blocking important pages in Robots.txt</li>
<li>Creating orphan pages with no internal links</li>
<li>Ignoring crawl errors</li>
<li>Using too many broken links</li>
<li>Thinking Crawling and Indexing are the same process</li>
</ul>
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<h2>Interview Questions</h2>
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<ul>
<li>What is Crawling?</li>
<li>Why is Crawling important?</li>
<li>Who performs Crawling?</li>
<li>Can a page rank without being crawled?</li>
<li>What is the difference between Crawling and Indexing?</li>
</ul>
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<h2>Summary</h2>
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<p>Crawling is the first step in the SEO process where search engine bots discover webpages and collect information from them. Once the information is collected, it is sent for Indexing. Without Crawling, a webpage cannot appear in search engine results.</p>
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<h2>Assignment</h2>
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<p>Open any website and click on different pages using its menu. Notice how every page is connected through links. Then think about how a search engine bot would move from one page to another while Crawling the website.</p>