About 92.16% of all internet searches are done on Google. That means that when a majority of the entire world population wants to check something on the World Wide Web, their go-to search engine is usually Google.
This in itself is not a bad thing, but it also means that you will need to understand several things if you want to appear on what Google shows searchers.
And one of the things to pay attention to is Google Crawler indexing and how it works. You may have a highly responsive website with awesome design and rich content, but without the process of crawling and indexing, no one in the world will visit your website or see its content.
But aside from helping to get your website indexed, web crawlers are also commonly known for helping to identify key issues that can affect the performance and overall accessibility of your website.
What Is A Web Crawler?
We can define a web crawler as a tool for browsing websites and their pages following URLs and moving from one relevant link to the next. Check here for more information on crawling and crawlers.
The goal of doing this is to learn from each website, harvest its content and URLs and follow the relevant URLs to other related websites to do the same thing.
This ensures the collection of highly relevant and high-quality data from across the web, but this is only one side of the coin.
Web crawlers are programming scripts used to read and organize websites and web pages. They are automated tools that can easily read and understand a website’s content and index them for search engines. And this is what this article will focus on below.
The Main Features and Uses of a Web Crawler
But for a crawling program to be considered a proper crawler, it must have any or all of the following features and be easily used for the purposes described above.
1. Easy Distribution
A crawling bot should have no trouble distributing its browsing across different internet spaces. It must be able to navigate through just about any website and collect data as it goes.
2. Scalability and Extensibility
For a bot to earn the title of a crawler, it has to be easily scalable and extensible. This means it needs to grow up to handle more tasks and more machines easily. It should also extend to handle new data formats and protocols and cope without crashing.
3. High Quality
Because of how ubiquitous the internet has become, a proper crawling bot should also feature the capacity to prioritize high-quality data.
Not every website provides quality and relevant data, and a crawler must understand this.
4. Freshness
The most converted crawlers also know how to identify and collect newer and updated information and refresh the stored one to make data more relevant.
The ability to see the freshness of data and make provisions for it is also something a good crawling program must possess.
What Is Google Index?
A Google index is a repository or source of most of the information on the internet. It is one-stop storage for all information contained on different websites worldwide.
The Google index is created to have all answers collected in one place so that when queries are made, results can be returned in a matter of seconds.
This becomes necessary when considering how Google holds a huge chunk of the market share. We know that most internet users go to Google for their searches, and by having a pool where all the answers are, Google makes showing relevant results to searchers seamless and faster.
Google indexing is made possible through scripts, programs, and bots that crawl the internet regularly to harvest information about old and new websites and continuously update the database.
Through indexing, information on new websites is submitted, and fresh data from old websites are gathered and used to update the system.
This ensures that the Google index contains virtually all the results in the world. However, no one is exactly sure how much internet has been indexed or how much information the Google index contains.
How Google Crawler Indexing Works
Google indexing works through the frequent tasks performed by web crawlers; hence it is important that we first define what is a web crawler.
A web crawler is a tool for browsing and crawling the internet to gather data and store it. The program is first fed a seed link to find information and other links. Then it follows the new links to repeat the process until a large pool of relevant and fresh data has been harvested.
The way Google indexing works can be simplified as shown below:
- The bot is given a seed URL to crawl
- It crawls that first URL and learns what the site is all about while gathering other fields of data plus embedded URLs
- Then it follows each of the new URLs to do the same thing
- Each time data is harvested, it is first added to the Google index automatically and arranged methodically
- Each time an internet user makes a request, the algorithm returns to that index and pull out relevant data to display immediately
However, there are a few problems that people often run into, which could prevent their websites from getting indexed and, consequently, getting included in search results. Below are some of these issues that may affect your website indexing:
1. The Feature is Not Enabled
While you could also get indexed when the web crawler follows a different link to your website, this option is often too unpredictable and slow.
Google encourages website owners to allow crawling on their site by connecting the website to Google Search Console (GSC) and enabling the feature that reads “submit to index.”
2. Poor Quality
Also, while Google wants to capture as much information as possible, they would not just add or display any website regardless of the quality. Quality is often checked before indexing is done.
Since the process is methodical, the most relevant website and content with the highest quality is given priority and indexed first.
Conclusion
Having known what a web crawler, Google index, and how it works is, the best thing to do is to allow the feature for crawling on your website and ensure your website and content are top-notch.
For the first part, all that is required is to connect to GSC, while the second aspect requires you to take Search Engine Optimization (SEO) very seriously.