What is crawlability? Without it, search engines won’t be able to access your website’s pages. Having a website with a strong ability to be crawled and indexed is an incredibly important part of technical SEO. It’s recommended for content marketers to understand what bot crawling does for their website and to establish a digital marketing strategy that will improve crawlability. 

Crawlability has a huge effect on SEO in the long run. Fortunately, you can always perform a site audit and make necessary changes to your website’s pages for best results. Here’s what crawlability means, what affects it, and how you can improve it:

The Meaning Behind Crawlability 

Simply put, crawlability is what allows Google and other search engines to access and crawl your website. A web crawler also referred to as a robot, a bot, or a spider goes out of its way to find and index new web content. Google explains that “They go from link to link and bring data about those web pages back to Google’s servers.” 

If your website is experiencing crawlability issues caused by broken links, the crawlers will not be able to access your page, thus missing out on relevant content to analyze. 

What Affects Your Website’s Crawlability 

Your website pages’ ability to be crawled can be affected by any of the following:

1. Internal Link Structure: A poor link structure might send your page to a dead-end, resulting in a crawler missing content.
2. Looped Redirects: Broken page redirects immediately result in crawlability issues.
3. Site Structure: If the pages on your site aren’t linked to from anywhere else, web crawlers may have difficulty accessing them.
4. Server Errors: Broken server redirects may prevent web crawlers from accessing all of your content.
5. Blocking Web Crawler Access: You can manually block web crawler access on your website, for multiple reasons such as restricting public access to a certain page.
6. Unsupported Scripts and Other Technology Factors: Various scripts like Javascript or Ajax may block content from web crawlers.

Improving Your Website’s Ability to Be Crawled

1. Avoid Duplicating Any Content: Individual pages on your website with similar content can result in losing rankings on search engines. 
2. Strengthen Internal Links: Keep your content connected throughout your website by improving the internal links between your pages.
3. Regularly Update and Add New Content: A crawler’s ability to access your pages is much quicker when you consistently add new content like blog posts.
4. Speed Up Your Page Load Time: Crawlers are on a time limit when they are doing their job. With a fast page loading speed, the more they can access in that time.
5. Submit Sitemap to Google: When you send your XML sitemap to Google, you’re alerting it of any content updates made. 

SEO Tactics for Maintaining Crawlability 

Now that you know what crawlability is and its’ importance in the world of digital marketing and technical SEO, it’s time to audit your website and boost your online presence!

Get connected with us to learn more about website crawlability and indexing.