A website with proper navigation has more chances (or I prefer using definite chances) of getting crawled and indexed by bots. Many things can be done to increase the crawl rate of the bots. Google is undoubtedly the most pivotal of all the search engines. Whenever we talk about search engines, we often end up with a default name GOOGLE. Before moving forward, let’s first understand some general facet of Google website crawl and indexing.
How a search engine bot crawls your website?
Consider a search engine as a big library with no central filing system. Daily, millions of new books reach the library as you can see how herculean this task can be. To handle such a gargantuan task search engine disseminates its bots (Googlebot is a bot for Google) in this huge library. A bot is rudimentarily a program to crawl through websites and collect related information and then returns with that information, which is used to index the websites properly. Now google bots crawl your website for different electronic gadgets like mobile, tablets, phablets, desktop, etc. and check whether your website complies with all required parameters or not. With this, another question arises, allow me to articulate it in the next bullet point.
How often does Google crawl your site?
According to Google’s Webmaster, a crawler (Googlebot) “regularly” crawls the website. Now, to be specific, they never mention any time for this. In their defense, they said that the crawl process is algorithmic, and no human mind is in control of it. Well, that is kinda logical (Damn, you can’t argue with a woman or Google!!!). However, Moz’s blogger Casey Henry proclaimed that he had found a total round off time. He conducted an interesting experiment to check the crawl rate of Googlebot. For 200 days, he let a script run, which stores the user agent info, page, and date visited in a database. He then tracked the site for 200 days and then declared his results here. In those results, he observed that when you set Google crawl rate to “Normal”, it took average 3.4 days first to visit the page, while it takes 2.9 days first to visit the page when the Google crawl rate is “Faster”. So, as you can see, it is very much clear how busy Google bots are.
How often does Google Index Sites?
Now, this is another huge task for a search engine. When a bot returns after crawling hundreds of million websites, they collect a massive pile of data. Now, the Search engine takes note of every website the bot has visited; it is just like an index at the back of a book, which contains every word used in the book. As all that information is categorically indexed, the main factors which play significant roles are key signals which vary from keywords to freshness of the website. Now, these were the general fact you should know about the Search engine’s crawling and indexing.
Tips to Force Google to Crawl Your Site
Let’s move forward to the next segment of this article, here I will be covering the course of action you need to take for improving crawl-ability, i.e., crawling rate of search engine bot in your website. Here we go,
1. Regularly Update Content
We all have heard this quote a lot, “Content is King”. And to be frank, it is quite true. For a search engine, content is the most important factor. All those sites which update their content regularly frequently crawled by the search engine bot. Frankly, all the static sites did not get crawled frequently. The best example to share in this scenario is a news website. A news website always gets frequent crawling of Google bots, and this is because they update the latest news almost every hour. Now I don’t mean you to update your website’s content on an hourly or a daily basis. However, it will be wiser if you can update the blog post of your website thrice in a week, at least to get optimum results. And YES, the essential part of this step is ping the search engine about it.
2. Submit Sitemap
Sitemaps are very crucial when it comes to crawl-ability of your website by search engine bots. When a website has well-defined sitemaps, it becomes easy for a bot to crawl the website. A sitemap is an XML file that contains the URLs inside your website. It provides a full detailed index for a search engine crawler. There are many advantages of sitemaps in SEO. Once you submit your sitemap to Google search console, you are good to go.
3. Plagiarism-free Content
Copied content is considered as a discriminatory act which tends to affect the crawling of the website. The search engine picks duplicate content very easily. Some speculations are if you regularly update your website with duplicate content, the search engine might ban your site or lower your ranks. So, in any condition, do not copy-paste content from other websites, try to deliver fresh and new content every time.
4. Fast Page Loading
Remember one key point regarding the site loading time. Google bots are tight in the budget (Their currency is time). So, if they spend too much time crawling the big images on your web page, they might not get time to visit other pages of your website, which can be turned out as a large contingency. So, increase your site loading time by optimizing the images, cluttering the code files, minifying your source code file, trimming the heavy graphics, and of course, by using CDN enabled plugins. It will speed up your website’s page loading time, and in return, you will be awarded as better crawl-ability of search engine bots. So, by following these steps, you can make a huge difference in the rate of the crawler to crawl your site. Now here’s a quick recap of what steps to follow to increase crawling rate, i.e., crawl-ability of bots on your website. So, if you like my suggestions, please do share it. Also, please mention your ideas in the comment sections, and let’s start a discussion.
