You know everything about search engine optimization. The importance of a well-structured website, relevant keywords, proper tags, technical standards, and great content. But you probably give Google index crawl optimization techniques little thought. A website crawl effectivity is the important first step to ensuring its searchability and index by Googlebot. This article will show you a guide with crawl management and optimization techniques to make Google index faster.
Googlebot optimization is different from SEO because it goes one level deeper. Search engine optimization focuses more on optimizing for user search queries. Optimization for Googlebot focuses on how Google’s crawlers access your site.
Of course, there is a lot of overlap. However, I want to make this important distinction because it can affect your website in several ways. To sum up, effectively crawling a website is the first step to ensure its searchability.
The Concept Of Crawl Depth
Crawl depth is the extent to which a search engine indexes pages within a website. Most websites contain multiple pages, which may contain subpages. Pages and subpages go as deep as folders, and subfolders (directories and subdirectories) go even deeper in computer memory.
In general, the further down in the Web site hierarchy a particular page appears, the smaller the chance it will appear with a high rank in a search engine results page (SERP). A Web site’s home page has a crawl depth 0 by default. Pages in the same site linked directly (with one click) from within the home page have a crawl depth of 1; pages linked directly from within crawl-depth-1 pages have a crawl depth of 2, and so on.
A crawler — a spider or bot — is a program that visits websites and reads their pages and other information to create entries for a search engine index.
Crawl Efficiency + .XML Sitemaps
Your site should have one or more XML sitemaps. These XML sitemaps tell Google what URLs are on your site. A good XML sitemap will show when you last updated your URLs. Most search engines crawl URLs in XML sitemaps more frequently than others.
XML sitemaps give you an added advantage in Google Search Console. For each Sitemap, Google will show you errors and warnings. You can use this by creating different XML sitemaps for different URL types. This means you can see which URL types are causing the most problems on your site.
Crawl Efficiency Common Errors
1) Crawl Optimization Techniques- Too Much 301 Redirects Usage
I recently checked out a website that had just moved its domain name. The site is huge, so I did a full crawl using one of our tools to see what we should fix. It was clear we had a big problem. A large set of URLs on this site are always linked without a trailing slash. So if you visit such a URL without a trailing slash, you will be redirected to a 301 redirect. You will be taken to the version with the trailing slash.
If you have this problem with one or two URLs on your site, that’s fine. This is usually a problem with the home page. If you have this problem with 250,000 URLs on your site, the problem is bigger. Instead of crawling 250,000 URLs, Googlebot crawls 500,000. This might be more efficient.
Therefore, you should always try to update the links on your website when you change the URL. If you don’t, you’ll get more and more 301 redirects over time. This slows down your crawl rate and user velocity. Most systems take up to a second to serve the redirect. This adds another second to the load time of the page.
2) 404 and More Issues
Google encountered an error while crawling your site. Usually, it just picks the next page from the stack. If your site encounters many errors while crawling, Googlebot will slow down. This is done for fear of crawling too fast and causing errors. So, it would be best if you fixed as many bugs as possible to prevent Googlebot from slowing down.
Google will report all these errors to you in their webmaster tools, as do Bing and Yandex. We’ve fixed bugs in Google Search Console (GSC) and Bing Webmaster Tools. However, if you have the Yoast SEO Premium plugin, you can use it to import from GSC and fix errors. You can do this directly from your WordPress admin.
You wouldn’t be the first client with 3,000 actual URLs and 20,000 errors in GSC. Keep your site from becoming that site. So, fix these errors regularly with this guide management crawl optimization techniques to make Google index faster every month.
3) Crawl Optimization Techniques- Hidden Problems
Funny things happen when your site becomes more authoritative in Google’s eyes. Even if it’s obvious that a link doesn’t make sense, Google will crawl it. Give Google a virtual infinite spiral staircase. It will continue.
Such pitfalls can lead to extremely inefficient search engine crawling. Fixing them almost always leads to better organic search results. The larger your site, the harder it is to spot such issues, even for Seasoned SEOs.
Identify Crawl Errors and Fix
If you are interested and want to test your website, you need some tools. We use Screaming Frog a lot during website reviews. This is the Swiss army knife for most SEOs.
An excellent first step is crawling a site and filtering for HTML pages—then sorting descending by HTTP status code. You’ll see 500 – 400 – 300 type responses at the top of the list. You can see how badly your site performs compared to the total number of URLs.
Final Words About Crawl Optimization Techniques
By implementing these crawl optimization techniques, you can enhance your website’s visibility in Google’s index and improve its chances of ranking well in search results. So we hope this management guide with crawl optimization techniques to make Google index faster has been of help to you.