What is Google Crawling and Indexing in SEO?

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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).
Google Crawling Indexing
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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 sitemaps, 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 web pages 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 to 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.

Backlinks

The more backlinks you have, the more trustworthy and reputable you are in the eyes of search engines.

If you have good rankings but aren’t earning any backlinks for your site, search engines may assume that you have low-quality content.

Read:

  1. Top 5 Online Backlink Checker Tools
  2. 101 Ways To Get Quality Backlinks To Your Blog

Internal Linking

There have been so many discussions regarding internal linking (also known as deep linking). People even suggest to use the same anchor text within the same article as it helps in the deep crawling of a site.

What’s important to remember is that internal linking is a good practice, not just for SEO, but also for maintaining active users on your website.

XML Sitemap

The moment you set up a site in WordPress, you are advised to use an XML sitemap so that your sitemap can be auto-generated. This way, Google will be informed that your site has been updated and will want to crawl it.

Read:

  1. How To Submit Sitemap To Google

Duplicate Content

This could be really bad for you.

Recently I found a site which had so many repeated paragraphs spread throughout different posts. This site was banned by Google because of this practice.

Try not to have any duplicate content on your site.

Fix all of your 301 and 404 re-directs for even better crawling and SEO.

Read:

  1. How To Fix “Replytocom” Issue To Avoid Duplicate Content
  2. Use Robots.txt To Fight Against Duplicate Content

URL Canonicalization

Create SEO friendly URLs for each page on your site.

This is huge for proper SEO.

Read:

  1. What Is URL Canonicalization and How Do You Use Canonical Tags Properly?

Meta Tags

Have unique and non-competitive meta tags for your website. This will ensure that you have top ranking in search engines. Avoid Keyword cannibalization at any cost, they have proven to reduce ranking as well.

Read:

  1. How To Use Meta Tag Analyzer While Doing SEO

Pinging

Make sure that you have added all of the main ping sites to your WordPress site. WordPress has an auto-pinging feature which will inform search engines about your website’s updates.

Read:

  1. WordPress Ping List

When you optimize your website based on these factors, Google will have no choice but to crawl and index your page faster and more accurately.

What do you do for faster indexing of your website? Join the discussion in the comments below!

Was this guide helpful?  Share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus!

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Authored By
I write about wordpress,Blogging , Online money making with a zeal to earn and flourish my knowledge.

17 thoughts on “What is Google Crawling and Indexing in SEO?”

  1. Raghubir

    Hii,, I had started a new blog abd submittwd the sitemap yesterday,that is almost 12-13 hours ago. But no pages have been indexed yet. Can you please suggest me why this is happenning and what could I do to get crawled and indexed si that I could start creating backlinks and submitting posts to social media. Reply soon please………?

  2. Priyanshu Raj

    Hi, I am thankful to you for sharing this awesome article with this helpful knowledge. this is the blog that provide the lots of good information thanks for provide such a good information.

  3. Sher Shah Hunzai

    I am a newbie in blogging. This resource is wonderful and informative for Bloggers, SEOBies. I got many insights on Google Index, Crawling, importance of meta-tags, keywords and domain name.
    Thank you ASHISH for such a wonderful and easy to understand article. Keep writing.

  4. Harshali Gorana

    Thanks for making this Soo much Easier to Understand. I genuinely need to learn this Type of Post. This post helped me a lot.
    So once again thanks …

  5. vikash kumar

    thanks a lot for this useful article. One thing I am sure is that I never find it difficult in getting index by Google or any other search engine. I will sharing this post with my friends who are bloggers.
    Keep up with the good work.

  6. Surendra

    Hello @ Harsh,
    Today I started learning SEO From starting from your first post ! Please update some posts as yoast SEO plugin as been updated a lot.

  7. doroki

    Yeah, You will have to add your site to webmaster tool for adding and indexing. robot.txt will be generating sitemap for you site that can be used as your site map on webmastertool. Backlinks and right contents are always good to get indexed by google as well as PR related stuffs.

  8. shenoyjoseph

    i agree these fact and following these method for my blog to get better results. “The more the number of backlinks you have more trust worthy and reputation you are in the eyes of search engine.”

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      Indeed but make sure you getting backlink on different pages and not only on homepage.

      1. Amit

        Yes ,It is.. but first we need home page indexed and get few quality backlinks to home page ..Thanks for the tip..Harsh

  9. sureshpeters

    hey author , you missed one important recipe which is called robots.txt, if you don’t make it. bots won’t be come effectively . making a sitemap is not only the task we have to submit to google, yahoo,bing, and more webmaster account and if you need indexing soon then you have to post recently then you will get into first page if the keyword is less competition

  10. WpRack

    Good post with important points. I have read in somewhere that the keywords included in the domain names are not given more preferrence after the panda update. Is that true?

  11. ajay s bisht

    ashish sir i would like to state my view on this article..
    although you have covered a lot topics in this but a little elaboration would have been of great help…
    hope you come up with a detailed article…
    regards

  12. Vineet

    For the Sitemap which plugin you prefer??

    1. Kar

      Google XML sitemap is working nice.

  13. Fayaz Ahmad

    If you need better crawling of your web pages the you should submit a sitemap to you root directory , for search engine and also create a site map for your users also

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