If search engines can’t find your webpages, all the optimization in the world will do no good. Boost your site’s crawlability and indexability to get found by search spiders.
Keywords and Content: Not the Only SEO Pillars
Keywords and content may be the twin pillars upon which most search engine optimization strategies are built, but they’re far from the only ones that matter. Less commonly discussed but equally important – not just to users but to search bots – is your website’s discoverability.
There are roughly 50 billion webpages on 1.93 billion websites on the internet. This is far too many for any human team to explore, so these bots, also called spiders, perform a significant role. These bots determine each page’s content by following links from website to website and page to page. This information is compiled into a vast database, or index, of URLs, which are then put through the search engine’s algorithm for ranking. This two-step process of navigating and understanding your site is called crawling and indexing.
Crawlability vs. Indexability
As an SEO professional, you’ve undoubtedly heard these terms before, but let’s define them just for clarity’s sake:
Crawlability: Refers to how well these search engine bots can scan and index your webpages.
Indexability: Measures the search engine’s ability to analyze your webpages and add them to its index.
Both are essential parts of SEO. If your site suffers from poor crawlability, for example, many broken links and dead ends, search engine crawlers won’t be able to access all your content, which will exclude it from the index. Indexability, on the other hand, is vital because pages that are not indexed will not appear in search results. How can Google rank a page it hasn’t included in its database?
The crawling and indexing process is a bit more complicated than we’ve discussed here, but that’s the basic overview. For a more in-depth discussion, Dave Davies has an excellent piece on crawling and indexing.
How To Improve Crawling And Indexing
Now that we’ve covered just how important these two processes are, let’s look at some elements of your website that affect crawling and indexing – and discuss ways to optimize your site for them.
1. Improve Page Loading Speed
Importance: With billions of webpages to catalog, web spiders don’t have all day to wait for your links to load. This is sometimes referred to as a crawl budget. If your site doesn’t load within the specified time frame, they’ll leave your site, which means you’ll remain uncrawled and unindexed. This is not good for SEO purposes.
Tools: Google Search Console, Screaming Frog.
Solutions: Regularly evaluate your page speed and improve it wherever you can. This could include upgrading your server or hosting platform, enabling compression, minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, and eliminating or reducing redirects. Check your Core Web Vitals report for what’s slowing down your load time. For more refined information from a user-centric view, Google Lighthouse is an open-source tool that may be very useful.
2. Strengthen Internal Link Structure
Importance: A good site structure and internal linking are foundational elements of a successful SEO strategy. A disorganized website is difficult for search engines to crawl, making internal linking one of the most important things a website can do.
But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what Google’s search advocate John Mueller had to say about it:
Quote: “Internal linking is super critical for SEO. I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important.” – John Mueller, Google’s search advocate.
Solutions: Create a logical internal structure for your site. Your homepage should link to subpages supported by pages further down the pyramid. These subpages should have contextual links where it feels natural. Avoid orphaned pages, which are pages that don’t link to any other part of your website, as they are hard for search engines to find. Double-check your URLs, especially if you’ve recently undergone a site migration, bulk delete, or structure change, and ensure you’re not linking to old or deleted URLs. Use anchor text for links, a reasonable number of links on a page, and ensure follow links for internal links.
3. Submit Your Sitemap To Google
Importance: Given enough time, Google will crawl your site, but this isn’t helping your search ranking while you’re waiting. Submitting a sitemap allows Google to learn about multiple pages simultaneously. A sitemap is a file in your root directory that serves as a roadmap for search engines with direct links to every page on your site.
How-To: Submit an XML sitemap via Google Search Console. This is particularly useful if you have a deep website, frequently add new pages or content, or your site does not have good internal linking.
4. Update Robots.txt Files
Importance: Robots.txt files manage bot traffic and keep your site from being overloaded with requests. They tell search engine crawlers how you would like them to crawl your site, which is handy for limiting which pages Google crawls and indexes.
Common Mistakes: Robots.txt not in the root directory, poor use of wildcards, noindex in robots.txt, blocked scripts, stylesheets, and images, and no sitemap URL.
Solutions: Regularly review and update your robots.txt file. Ensure it is correctly placed in the root directory, uses wildcards properly, does not block important scripts and images, and includes the sitemap URL.
For an in-depth examination of each of these issues – and tips for resolving them, read this article.
5. Check Your Canonicalization
Importance: Canonical tags consolidate signals from multiple URLs into a single canonical URL, helping to tell Google to index the pages you want while skipping duplicates and outdated versions.
Solutions: Use a URL inspection tool to scan for rogue canonical tags and remove them. If your website targets international traffic, ensure you have canonical tags for each language to ensure your pages are indexed in each language your site uses.
6. Perform A Site Audit
Importance: Ensures all optimizations are effective. A site audit starts with checking the percentage of pages Google has indexed for your site.
Steps:
Check Indexability Rate: Find the number of pages in Google’s index via Google Search Console and divide by the total number of pages on your website. If the indexability rate is below 90%, investigate the issues.
Audit Newly Published Pages: Ensure newly published or updated pages are being indexed. If issues persist, use tools like Screaming Frog, Semrush, Ziptie, Oncrawl, and Lumar to identify problems.
Tools: Google Search Console (URL Inspection Tool, Index Coverage Report).
7. Check For Low-Quality Or Duplicate Content
Importance: Google avoids indexing low-quality content. Thin content, poorly written content, boilerplate content, or content with no external signals about its value and authority can cause issues.
Solutions: Refresh or replace thin content, fix coding issues causing duplicate content, and review and update tags. Ensure content provides high-quality answers to searchers’ questions.
8. Eliminate Redirect Chains And Internal Redirects
Importance: Multiple redirects can hinder indexing. Redirect chains occur when there’s more than one redirect between the link clicked on and the destination, which Google doesn’t favor.
Tools: Screaming Frog, Redirect-Checker.org.
Solutions: Simplify redirects and avoid redirect loops, where a page redirects back to the original page, creating a never-ending loop.
9. Fix Broken Links
There are a number of ways you can find broken links on your site, including manually evaluating each and every link on your site (header, footer, navigation, in-text, etc.), or you can use Google Search Console, Analytics or Screaming Frog to find 404 errors.
Importance: Broken links hurt crawlability and user experience.
Tools: Google Search Console, Analytics, Screaming Frog.
Solutions: Regularly check for broken links and either redirect, update, or remove them.
10. Implement IndexNow
Importance: IndexNow allows URLs to be submitted simultaneously to multiple search engines via an API, providing crawlers with a roadmap to your site upfront.
How-To: Generate an API key, host it in your directory or another location, and submit your URLs in the recommended format. This allows you to inform search engines about non-200 status code pages, unlike XML sitemaps.
Wrapping Up
By now, you should have a good understanding of your website’s indexability and crawlability. You should also understand just how important these two factors are to your search rankings. If Google’s spiders can’t crawl and index your site, it doesn’t matter how many keywords, backlinks, and tags you use – you won’t appear in search results. Regularly check your site for issues, use appropriate tools, and ensure search engines can effectively crawl and index your site to improve your SEO performance.
