Web crawlers

Web crawlers are automated programs, also known as bots or spiders, that search engines use to explore and index websites. They visit pages on the internet, follow links, and collect information about the content.

Search engines like Google use crawlers, such as Googlebot, to understand what your website is about. This helps them organize and rank pages in SERP.

Crawlers look at elements like text, images, links, and metadata. They also check your site’s URL structure and follow links to discover new pages. For example, if a crawler finds a link to a new blog post, it will visit and analyze that page. To make this process easier for web crawlers, you should have a strong internal linking profile.

Web crawlers are essential for SEO because they determine how search engines index your site. If crawlers can’t access your pages, those pages won’t appear in search results.

You can guide crawlers using tools like a robots.txt file or a sitemap. The robots.txt file tells crawlers which pages to avoid to save on crawl budget, while a sitemap helps them find important pages.