This video covers website crawling and offers tips to optimise your site for better discoverability. We discuss various web crawlers, how they work, and ways to control them using robots.txt files, meta tags, and link attributes. To improve crawlability, we recommend using a sitemap, enhancing website speed, implementing internal linking, adding breadcrumbs, and configuring robots.txt files appropriately. Watch the video or read the summary below:
This video covers the following topics:
- What website crawling is
- Types of web crawlers
- How crawlers work
- Controlling crawlers on your website
- Differences between crawling and scraping
- Optimising your site for easier crawling
Website Crawling:
Website crawling is the automated process of browsing and downloading content from web pages to index and analyse a website’s content. A web crawler, also known as a bot or spider, is a software program that visits websites and follows links to various pages, extracting information and building an index based on website content.
Examples of Web Crawlers:
Some popular web crawlers include Googlebot, Amazonbot, Bingbot, Yahoo Slurp, DuckDuckBot, Yandex bot, and Baidu spider.
How Web Crawlers Work:
Web crawlers start with a set of URLs or a domain in their index, discovering additional links on those pages, and adding them to a queue for further crawling. Not all links are crawled, as factors such as site size and speed can influence priority.
Controlling Crawlers:
To control crawlers on your site, utilise the robots.txt file, robots meta tag, and link attributes.
Types of Crawls:
There are site crawls, which involve crawling an entire website, and page crawls, which focus on a single URL. For Google crawls, there are discovery and refresh phases.
Optimising Your Website for Crawling:
To optimise your site for easier crawling, use a sitemap, improve your website’s speed, utilise internal linking, add breadcrumbs, and configure your robots.txt file.
Conclusion:
Understanding and optimising your website for crawling is crucial to improve your site’s discoverability. If you have any questions or want to learn more about Hike SEO, leave a comment below or visit their website.
