It’s not just the content or the backlinks or the user experience which affects the rankings of a website. These are crucial factors, but crawlability and indexability also affect rankings. It makes it easier for bots to discover and index webpages. This post lists ways to improve crawlability and indexability of a website.
Crawlability is the ability of the search engine bot to access the content of a web page. And, indexability is the ability of the search engine bot to access a particular content on a website. Both these factors play an important role when it comes to a website appearing in the SERPs.
If a website is easily crawlable, bots will be able to know what the content is. If it’s easily indexable, search engines will be able to show the webpage in the result pages when a search query is done for relevant content. Following are the major factors affecting crawlability and indexability:
Factors affecting crawlability and indexability
- Site structure: It is important to have a proper hierarchical website structure as it will become easier for bots to crawl each webpage. It might be difficult for web crawlers to access the pages, if any of them have no linkage to any other content. A bad website structure can cause crawlability error. Read our blog on COMMON SEO CRAWL ERRORS AND HOW TO FIX THEM to know what are the possible errors that you may encounter while doing SEO.
- Internal linking structure: The internal linking structure is important as well. This is because crawlers access web pages by following links. So content can be found by web crawlers when it is linked to other content. A good internal link structure will allow bots to quickly access all the web pages on your website.
- Redirects and server errors: Broken page redirects and server related errors prevent web crawlers from accessing all the content.
- Robots.txt: Crawlability and indexability issues come up when something is wrong in the robots.txt file. A simple error in code can block multiple web pages on a website. So the robots.txt is an important factor when it comes to crawling and indexing of a website and becomes even crucial if you have a Js based website. Read our blog on JAVASCRIPT AND SEO: BEST PRACTICES FOR JS BASED SITES to get more insights if you also have a Js based site.
How to improve crawlability and indexability
- Submit XML sitemap: Creating a sitemap and submitting it is one of the best SEO tactics to submit a website to Google/Bing. A sitemap contains links to every page on the website and it tells search engine bots about the content. It is important as it can alert search engines about any updates you have made in the website. Thus, checking XML sitemap status is also one of the 8 STEPS TO A BETTER TECHNICAL SEO AUDIT.
- Strengthen link structure: Internal link structure effects crawlability and indexability. So to improve crawlability and indexability of a website, create strong internal links between the content. It will make it easier for the crawler to find all the content on your website.
- Update content: When it comes to SEO, creating content is important. Content attracts visitors and plays a huge role in converting them. The IMPORTANCE OF CONTENT IN SEO MARKETING lies in improving a website’s crawlability. The reason being that search engine crawlers regularly visit websites which update or add more content regularly.
- Improve page speed: If your web page takes a lot of time to load, web crawlers will typically leave your website. As a result, the crawl budget will exhaust. So, improvement in page speed will positively impact crawling and indexing.
- Avoid duplicate content: Duplicate content can result in a fall in rankings. It also decreases the crawling of a website by bots. So it is important to avoid duplicate content issues. Moreover, it can be a reason to sudden website traffic loss.
Conclusion
In short, all search engine optimisation efforts will go in vain if the search engine crawlers cannot crawl or index a website. So you should periodically monitor if there are any issues in your crawlability or indexability. Hence, in addition to focusing on content, keywords, links and other aspects, it is also necessary to improve crawlability and indexability of a website.
