Crawling is the first stage in the working process of a search engine, which consists of “Crawling, Indexing, Ranking”.
So, what is the definition of crawling and its function in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)? Here is the explanation!
Definition of Crawling
In SEO and GEO, crawling refers to the process where a web crawler visits a website to understand the content of a web page and sends that data to the search engine.
The term crawling originates from the word crawl, which means to move on hands and knees or creep. This term was chosen because a web crawler is depicted as a spider crawling through the web of the internet.
How Crawling Works
During the crawling process, a web crawler performs two main tasks: visiting pages and understanding page content.
Visiting Pages
Web crawlers visit pages through various ways, with the most familiar being:
- Internal links, where the web crawler moves via links to other pages on the same website.
- External links, where the web crawler moves via links to pages on different websites.
- Sitemaps, a site map created so that web crawlers can visit every page on a website.
The visit process of a web crawler is crucial in SEO because it relates to the index status of a page.
Pages that cannot be accessed by web crawlers will most likely not be indexed by search engines. Because access to a page is so important, there is a term called Orphan Page for pages that have no inbound links, which is highly avoided in SEO.
Understanding Page Content
After successfully entering a page, the web crawler’s next task is to understand the content of the page.
The way a web crawler understands page content is by reading the HTML and JavaScript codes that construct the page. Examples of code read by the crawler include:
- Heading Tags, which are the titles and subtitles on the page.
- Text, the main body of the page.
- Image Alternative Text, text descriptions for images.
- Internal and External Links, links that provide additional context about the page.
- and so on.
The information received by the web crawler will then be sorted again by the search engine before being indexed.
For example, for the Google search engine, this status can be viewed in Google Search Console. There, reports such as “Discovered – Currently not indexed”, “Crawled – Currently not indexed”, and “Page is indexed” will be displayed, showing the status of your website pages on Google Search.
Conclusion
Crawling is the first stage of the search engine process.
The process involves web crawlers entering pages via links and then reading the page content. Crawling is important in SEO because pages that cannot be accessed by web crawlers will most likely not be indexed by search engines.
