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One aspect of search engine optimization that often gets overlooked is how easily search engines can find and comprehend your website.
This process, known as crawling and indexing, is crucial for your site to appear in search results. If your pages aren’t crawled, they can’t be indexed, and without indexing, they won’t rank or show up in SERPs.
In this article, we’ll explore 13 actionable steps to enhance your website’s crawlability and indexability. By applying these techniques, you can assist search engines like Google in navigating and categorizing your site more effectively, potentially improving your search rankings and online presence.
Whether you’re new to SEO or refining your current approach, these tips will ensure your website is as search-engine-friendly as possible.
Let’s delve into how to optimize your site for better accessibility by search engine bots.
Page loading speed is essential for both user experience and search engine crawlability. To enhance your page speed, consider these strategies:
In addition to general page speed improvements, it’s crucial to focus on optimizing your Core Web Vitals scores. Core Web Vitals are specific metrics that Google uses to assess a webpage’s user experience. They include:
To pinpoint issues related to Core Web Vitals, use tools such as Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report, Google PageSpeed Insights, or Lighthouse. These tools offer detailed performance insights and improvement suggestions.
To enhance Core Web Vitals, consider the following strategies:
By addressing both general page speed and Core Web Vitals, you can create a faster, more user-friendly site that search engines can easily crawl and index.
Crawl budget refers to the number of pages Google will crawl on your site within a specific period. This budget is influenced by factors such as your site’s size, overall health, and popularity.
For sites with numerous pages, it’s essential to make sure that Google focuses on crawling and indexing the most critical ones. Here’s how to optimize your crawl budget:
A well-organized site structure and effective internal linking are crucial for a successful SEO strategy. A disorganized website can be challenging for search engines to crawl, making internal linking a key component of optimizing your site.
John Mueller, Google’s search advocate, emphasizes the importance of internal linking:
“Internal linking is super critical for SEO. I think it’s one of the biggest things you can do on a website to guide both Google and visitors to the pages that you deem important.”
Poor internal linking can lead to orphaned pages—those not linked from any other part of your site. Without links directing to these pages, search engines can only discover them through your sitemap.
To avoid this and other issues caused by poor site structure, establish a clear internal hierarchy. Your homepage should link to subpages, which should then be linked to by pages further down the hierarchy. Ensure these subpages contain contextual links that feel natural.
Additionally, watch out for broken links, including those with URL typos, as they result in 404 errors (page not found). Broken links harm your site’s crawlability.
Check your URLs, especially after site migrations, bulk deletions, or structural changes, to avoid linking to old or deleted URLs.
Best practices for internal linking include:
By implementing these strategies, you’ll improve your site’s structure and enhance its SEO performance.
Given enough time and if you haven’t restricted it, Google will eventually crawl your site. However, this process alone won’t boost your search ranking immediately.
If you’ve recently updated your content and want Google to recognize these changes quickly, you should submit a sitemap through Google Search Console.
A sitemap is a file located in your root directory that acts as a roadmap for search engines, providing direct links to every page on your site.
This enhances indexability by allowing Google to discover multiple pages at once. While a crawler might need to follow several internal links to find a deeper page, submitting an XML sitemap enables it to locate all your pages in one go.
Submitting a sitemap is especially beneficial for deep websites, sites with frequent updates, or those with weak internal linking.
A robots.txt file is essential for your website. This plain text file, located in your site’s root directory, directs search engines on how to crawl your site. Its main purpose is to manage bot traffic and prevent your site from being overwhelmed by requests.
In terms of crawlability, the robots.txt file helps control which pages Google crawls and indexes. For instance, you might want to exclude pages such as directories, shopping carts, and tag pages from Google’s index.
However, this file can also unintentionally hinder your site’s crawlability. It’s important to review your robots.txt file—either personally or with the help of an expert—to ensure you’re not accidentally blocking access to important pages.
Common mistakes with robots.txt files include:
A canonical tag helps Google identify which page should be considered the authoritative version when multiple pages are similar or duplicate. While it’s a useful directive, it’s not always enforced consistently.
Canonical tags can guide Google to index the preferred pages and avoid duplicates or outdated versions. However, improper use of canonical tags can lead to issues, such as pointing to old or non-existent pages. This can result in search engines indexing the wrong pages and leaving your preferred content unindexed.
To address this, use a URL inspection tool to check for and remove any rogue canonical tags.
For websites targeting international audiences, it’s important to use canonical tags for each language version. This ensures that search engines correctly index and serve your pages in the appropriate languages.
After completing all the previous steps, the final action to ensure your site is fully optimized for crawling and indexing is to conduct a site audit.
Start by checking your site’s indexability rate, which measures how many of your pages Google has indexed. This is calculated by dividing the number of indexed pages by the total number of pages on your site.
You can find this information in Google Search Console by navigating to the “Pages” tab. Compare this with the total number of pages listed in your CMS admin panel.
While it’s normal for some pages to remain unindexed—such as those you don’t want to appear in search results—your indexability rate should ideally be above 90%. If it’s lower, further investigation is needed.
Retrieve a list of non-indexed URLs from Search Console and audit them to determine the cause of the issue.
The URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console is another useful resource. It lets you see how Googlebot views your pages, helping you identify rendering issues by comparing what Google sees to what users see.
When publishing new content or updating key pages, use Google Search Console to ensure they are indexed. Use the inspection tool to verify indexing and, if necessary, request indexing for those pages. Updates typically reflect within a few hours to a day.
If problems persist, a thorough audit can reveal additional shortcomings in your SEO strategy. Enhance your audit process with tools like:
Duplicate content can cause problems for bots crawling your site, as they might get confused about which version of a page to index. This confusion can arise from factors such as session IDs, redundant content, or pagination issues.
If Google detects more URLs than expected, it might trigger an alert in Google Search Console. If you haven’t received such a notification, review your crawl results for duplicate or missing tags and URLs with extraneous characters that could be complicating the crawl process.
To resolve these issues, correct any problematic tags, remove unnecessary pages, or adjust Google’s access settings.
As websites grow and change, redirects become necessary to guide visitors from outdated or less relevant pages to newer ones. While redirects are common, improper management can negatively impact your indexing.
One frequent issue is redirect chains, where multiple redirects occur between the initial link and the final destination. Google views this negatively and it can affect your SEO.
In more severe cases, you might create a redirect loop, where a page redirects to another, which in turn redirects to another, eventually cycling back to the original page. This creates an endless loop with no resolution.
To avoid these problems, regularly check your site’s redirects using tools like Screaming Frog or Redirect-Checker.org.
Broken links can significantly damage your site’s crawlability. To avoid hurting your SEO and frustrating users, it’s important to regularly check for and address any broken links.
You can identify broken links through several methods, such as manually reviewing every link across your site— including those in the header, footer, navigation, and within text—or by using tools like Google Search Console, Analytics, or Screaming Frog to detect 404 errors.
Once you’ve located the broken links, you have three options for resolving them: redirecting them (refer to the previous section for considerations), updating them, or removing them altogether.
IndexNow is a protocol designed to help websites proactively alert search engines about changes to their content, allowing for faster indexing of new, updated, or removed information. By using IndexNow effectively, you can enhance your site’s crawlability and indexability.
It’s important to use IndexNow selectively and only for significant content updates that add considerable value to your site. Key examples of meaningful changes include:
Avoid overusing IndexNow by submitting duplicate URLs too frequently, as this can harm your site’s trust and rankings. Make sure your content is fully live on your site before notifying IndexNow.
If possible, integrate IndexNow with your content management system (CMS) to streamline updates. If you’re handling notifications manually, follow best practices by informing search engines about both new and updated content, as well as content that has been removed.
By incorporating IndexNow into your content update process, you ensure that search engines have the latest version of your site’s content, which can improve crawlability, indexability, and overall search visibility.
Structured data is a standardized method for describing the content on your web pages and classifying it in a way that search engines can easily understand.
By incorporating structured data into your website, you help search engines grasp the context of your content better, which can improve your chances of appearing in rich results and boost your search visibility.
Here are the main types of structured data:
<head> or <body>.To implement structured data on your site, follow these steps:
Structured data can enhance various types of content, including:
By using structured data, you provide search engines with additional context about your content, helping them understand and index your pages more accurately. This can lead to increased visibility in search results, particularly through rich results like featured snippets, carousels, and knowledge panels.
By following these 13 steps, you’ll make it easier for search engines to discover, understand, and index your content.
Keep in mind that this isn’t a one-time effort. Regularly monitor your site’s performance, address any emerging issues, and stay updated with the latest search engine guidelines.
With ongoing diligence, you’ll build a more search-engine-friendly website with a better chance of ranking well.
If you encounter areas needing improvement, don’t get discouraged. Each step you take to enhance your site’s crawlability and indexability moves you closer to better search performance.
Start with foundational improvements, such as boosting page speed and optimizing site structure, and gradually tackle more advanced techniques.
Improving your website’s accessibility for search engines not only boosts your ranking potential but also enhances the experience for your visitors.
So, dive in, apply these tips, and watch as your website gains visibility and value in the digital realm.
Original news from SearchEngineJournal
