What Is Crawling? How Website Crawling Works in SEO

In SEO, understanding “what crawl is” and how website crawling works is important for optimizing content and improving your site's rankings in search results. With this concept, you can make sure the important information on your site is recognized and displayed correctly by search engines. Today's article from MONA Media gives an in-depth look at what crawl is and how it works in SEO, so you can find ways to improve your site's performance. Don't miss it.

What is crawl?

Understanding data crawling is the first step in optimizing a website and improving its ranking on search engines. Let's go through these two basic concepts with MONA below. 

What is crawling?

What is crawling? What is data crawling? are questions SEO beginners often ask when they start doing SEO and managing a website. 

Put simply, Crawl is the process of collecting and scanning data on web pages using search engine bots ((also called spiders). The goal of crawling is to collect information about a website's structure and content, so it can be indexed and ranked in search results. The data can include text, images, video, PDFs and many other formats. Understanding “What data crawling is and how it is used” will help you optimize your website to improve its visibility and SEO performance.

What is a crawler? Uses of web crawlers

Crawlers are automated programs designed to browse web pages and collect data. Major search engines such as Google use web crawlers to crawl data and index web content, which improves search results. 

Web crawlers are used for more than SEO to reach the top of Google They also extend to collecting structured data, monitoring changes on the web and supporting market analysis. Understanding what crawl is helps improve your SEO performance and manage your website more professionally.

-> You may also want to read: What is web scraping? How it works and how to use it effectively

Why is web crawling important for finding information online?

Data crawling plays an extremely important role in finding information online, shown in the 3 points below:

• It lets search engines collect and index millions of web pages: So when a user runs a query, the search engine can return accurate, relevant results in the shortest time.

• It keeps the information people find current and accurate: With new web pages and content created every day, data crawling tools constantly scan websites to pick up new content, so users get information quickly and reliably.

• It supports data analysis and evaluation of campaign performance: By collecting and analyzing information from many sources, businesses can make the right decisions and run more effective marketing strategies.

Beyond optimizing search results, data crawling also brings other important benefits, with the ultimate aim of saving users time and effort and giving them the most accurate and relevant search results.

How search engine bots crawl website data

Search engine bots work by collecting and indexing information when crawling website data. How a bot works is fairly simple. It starts with:

• The search engine bot goes through a list of URL. 
• The bot collects data from these URLs and looks for links to new URLs to expand the crawl list.
• It then crawls data and keeps going through other related URLs.

At this point, bots prioritize web pages based on factors such as: the number of backlink, traffic and the importance of the content, among others. Websites with strong metrics are usually seen as providing quality, authoritative information, so their data is crawled first.

In addition, search engine bots also follow policies on how often and in what order to crawl, which makes sure important and recently updated pages are crawled more often. This helps deliver accurate, timely search results to users. 

How do you stop Google from crawling unimportant data on your website?

Want to stop Google from crawling data you don't want on your website? Let's look at 3 common ways to improve your site's SEO by stopping Google from crawling information you don't want crawled.

Use robots.txt to control crawling

Robots.txt file is placed in the root directory of the website, and contains directives telling search engine bots which parts of the site should or should not be crawled. This helps you protect sensitive information and optimize crawl performance.

Robots.txt also lets you control the crawl rate, which reduces server load and improves site performance. When Googlebot finds a robots.txt file, it follows the directives to crawl data sensibly. This makes sure important pages are indexed and rank well in search results.

Optimize your crawl budget

Crawl Budget is the number of URLs Googlebot can crawl before it stops. To optimize this, note the following:

• Make sure Googlebot does not crawl unimportant or duplicate pages, so it can focus on important, unique content.
• Use a robots.txt file to tell Googlebot not to visit unnecessary parts of the website.
• Consider using directives such as the “Canonical” or “Noindex” tag to guide Googlebot in handling pages correctly, which helps avoid duplicate content problems.

URL parameters feature in Google Search Console

URL parameters are pieces of code added to the main URL to distinguish different versions of the same page content.

For example, when you shop on Shopee, you can use parameters to filter products by price, color or size according to your preferences. The URL parameters feature in Google Search Console works the same way. This feature lets you tell Googlebot how to handle these parameters: index them or ignore them. This stops Googlebot from crawling duplicate pages and keeps your index clean and efficient. 

What factors affect a web crawler during crawling?

Data crawling is not a random process. It is governed by several factors. Here are the factors MONA thinks you should pay attention to in order to “collaboration” with Googlebot more effectively:

• Domain: A domain that contains the main keyword or matches the website's content is rated more highly, which increases visibility in search results.
• Backlinks: Quality backlinks from trustworthy sources make your site more search-engine friendly and improve its rankings.
• Internal Links: Internal links help bots move through different pages, and they also improve user experience, keep users on your website longer and improve SEO performance.
• XML Sitemap: A sitemap notifies search engines so that new articles or changes on your website are picked up quickly by Google and other search engines.
• Duplicate Content: Having a lot of identical content across pages lowers a site's SEO value and gets penalized by Google. You can fix this with 301 redirects and by handling 404 errors so the site is crawled and ranked better.
• URL Canonical: Make sure multiple URLs do not lead to the same content. A canonical URL helps Google understand which version of a URL is the official one that should be ranked in search results.
• Meta Tags: This helps Google and users understand the page's content better and makes it more likely to attract users searching your target keywords.

Crawl bots of popular search engines today

And of course, tools are an essential part of crawling data effectively. Let's look at the crawl bots of popular search engines todayto help you speed up your SEO work:

Googlebot from Google

Googlebot is a robot software developed by Google and known as an important tool for crawling data. Googlebot makes sure web pages are fully updated and shown in Google search results. You can use this bot to improve your SEO campaign by:

• Using the information Googlebot collects (such as titles, content, links and other elements) to check and optimize your website, which improves its position in search results. 
• Googlebot also helps track changes on your website so you can make the adjustments needed to maintain and improve your rankings. 

-> Read next: A-Z guide to submitting a URL to Google the fastest way 

Bingbot from Bing

Bingbot in crawling? Bingbot is an important part of Bing's search system, responsible for collecting and updating data from websites across the internet to give users accurate, reliable search results. Bingbot's main activities include:

• Collecting data: Bingbot automatically collects information from websites by following the links on them. It takes information such as titles, content, links and other elements and stores it in Bing's database.
• Updating data: Bingbot regularly re-crawls pages it has already collected to make sure the information is current and accurate. It also tracks changes on websites to update Bing's database.
• Ranking websites: Bingbot evaluates factors such as content, trustworthiness and SEO optimization to determine a website's ranking in Bing search results. This process improves a website's performance and visibility on the Bing search platform.

Yandexbot from Yandex

Yandexbot is an important part of Yandex's search system. So what is Yandexbot's main job in crawling? Its tasks are similar to Bingbot and Googlebot and include:

• Crawling data by following links on web pages to collect information such as titles, content, links and other elements of the site.
• Storing and periodically updating data in Yandex's database.
• Yandexbot re-crawls the web pages it has collected to make sure the information is current and accurate, and tracks changes on websites to adjust the database.
• Evaluating and ranking websites in Yandex search results based on criteria such as content, trustworthiness and SEO optimization.

Understanding “what crawl is” hay “what crawling is” will help you make sure your website is easy to crawl and index, which improves its position in search results and your business performance. Mastering how website crawling works also helps you build a smarter and more effective SEO strategy . If you want to stand out in the online race and rise to the top of Google, contact MONA for advice on the right solution and the website SEO quote that best fits your SEO needs.