Definition of Crawl

Crawl (or spidering) is a detection process when search engines send robot (known as crawler or spider) to find new content on other new web pages. The content can vary, it can be a web page, pictures, PDFs, or others. There are several reasons why crawling in a website is done, which are:

• Have XML Sitemap with submitted and sent URL to Google
• Have an internal link that refers to the site
• Have an external link that refers to the site
• Get a traffic spike on the website

To make sure that users have done crawling on a web page, users must have XML Sitemap uploaded by Google Search Console to give the road map to Google for all new contents.

Factors Affecting Crawl

1. Backlink

The more a web page has backlink, the more it can be trusted and got a good reputation from search engines. If a web page has a high rank, but it does not have any backlink in it, search engines will consider it as a web page with a low quality content.

2. Internal Link

Many people suggest using the same anchor text in the same article, as it aims to help the indexing on a website deeper.

3. XML Sitemap

When using word press, users are suggested to use XML Sitemap. This will notify Google that the site has been updates, and it wants to crawl the site.

4. Duplicate Content

More same paragraphs and contents will lead Google to ban the site. Fixing all code 301 and 404 on site makes crawl activity and SEO better.

5. Page Title

Creating friendly URL title is a great step for SEO.

6. Meta Tag

Creating unique Meta Tags on website can increase the rank on search engines and enable to crawl the page.

7. Pinging

Adding main ping on wordpress site will make the crawling and indexing faster and more accurate on a web page.

Ways to Optimize Crawl for SEO

1. Allow Important Page to be Crawled on Robots.Txt

Using robot.txt on a website page makes it easier and effective at crawling. Adding robot.txt to selected tools will enable to allow or block crawling from any pages of domain in seconds.

2. Beware of Redirect Code

Ideally, it is possible to avoid redirect chain on the whole domain. However, the codes are always covered so that it makes a limitation to crawl because it does not reach the page that users want to index.

3. Do not let HTTP Error Affect Crawl

Technically, 404 and 410 page is very disturbing when opening the web page. By fixing the status code 4xx and 5xx, it makes crawling easier and helpful.

4. Use HTML

Nowadays, Crawler is better in crawling on JavaScript. On the other side, there are search engines that do not use JavaScript. Thus, try to always use HTML in crawling.

5. Taking Care of URL Parameter

Separated URL is considered as a separated page by crawler. By notifying Google about the URL parameter, it makes crawling more effective and also avoids any content plagiarism.

6. Update Your Sitemap

Updating the sitemap makes bot understand quickly and easily go to where the link refers. Make sure that you have uploaded the new version of robot.txt

7. Use Hreflang Tags

Crawling process uses hreflang tag to analyze a local page, and sometimes the tag is on the header of a website page, also "lang_code" is a code for the supported language.