Crawling, in the context of the internet, refers to the process by which search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo systematically browse the web to discover and index web pages. Search engine crawlers, also known as spiders or bots, navigate through the links on web pages, following them from one page to another.
When a crawler visits a webpage, it analyzes the content and indexes it based on various factors such as keywords, meta tags, and relevance. This indexing enables search engines to quickly retrieve relevant information in response to user queries.
Crawling is an essential step in the search engine optimization (SEO) process, as it determines whether a webpage will be included in a search engine’s index and, consequently, whether it will appear in search results.
What is Crawling?
Crawling is what search engines do to find and categorize web pages on the internet that they’re told to index. If you don’t want your web page to show up in search results, you can tell a web crawler to skip it. This is done through meta directives, like meta tags, which give instructions to search engines on how to handle your page.
Figuring out which pages a web crawler visits can help you see which ones are most important. To see how much attention different types of pages get during crawling, you can organize them by type.
Web crawlers start by visiting a page and then follow links to discover new pages. These new pages are added to the list to be visited later. Web crawlers can index any page that’s linked to others using these methods.
You can also tell search engine crawlers whether a page should be indexed in search results or if links on the page should be followed. This is done with Robots Meta Tags in your page’s HTML or through the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.
Crawling Instructions:
Index/noindex: Decides if a page should be indexed for search results. Using “noindex” tells crawlers not to show the page in search results. You might use this if you want to remove certain pages, like user profiles, from Google’s index but still let people access them.
– follow/nofollow: Says if search engines should follow links on a page. “Follow” means bots follow the links and pass on their value, while “nofollow” means they don’t. Usually, all pages are set to “follow” by default.
– noarchive: Stops search engines from saving a copy of the page. This might be useful for e-commerce sites with changing prices to make sure old prices don’t show up in search results.
You can manage these instructions with a robots.txt file, which tells search engines how to crawl and index your website.
