How to crawl a website: methods and techniques

Organic search raises several concerns. Among them: the structure, the internal linking, the volume of pages, and the site’s information architecture.

Crawling a platform remains an essential operation if you want to optimize a site’s SEO (search engine optimization). So what are the methods and techniques for crawling a website?

What does it mean to crawl a site?

To crawl literally means to “scan.” In other words, it means extracting as much information as possible from a website. That analysis lets you understand a site’s structure thoroughly and fix its problems: a poorly built architecture, inadequate internal linking, or duplicated meta tags, for example.

In other words, crawler software (or an indexing robot) looks for documents on the internet. It is the exploration of the web in order to automate navigation. Search engines are equipped with crawlers to handle indexing. The best known remains Googlebot, Google’s crawler. During the operation, Googlebot walks through the site’s content and the links it finds. That is how the program builds sitemaps, which make the crawlers’ work easier. Beyond indexing by search engines, exploration software also looks for other information, including RSS feeds and email addresses.

After the analysis, the result is sent into Google’s catalog, confirming that the site is present in the search engines’ index. That presence does not, however, imply better organic rankings.

These procedures are essential if you want relevant site content and if you want to keep useless URLs out of the databases. Some tags, notably the “noindex” tag, also stop search engines from indexing a page. Indexing only part of a site can be a sound choice, especially in light of your organic search strategy.

What is crawl budget?

Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot walks. Every site has its own budget, and the quota depends on the total number of pages and on the health of the website. You can find this budget in Google Search Console.

The number of crawls underlines how important one file is relative to others. To get there, you need to investigate crawl frequency, identify pages that have no value for the robot, and record the errors it hits along the way. Software is essential for that kind of analysis, which is part of an SEO audit. Botify is a paid tool that produces excellent reports. Note that it suits sites with more than 10,000 pages. Oncrawl is a less expensive option and a tool that has progressed quickly. Finally, Screaming Frog, available only in English, is a very complete and capable tool.

Factors that influence the crawl

The crawl technique works according to several different factors.

Links: the first factors that influence the crawl

Websites are especially numerous on the internet. Yet some enjoy better rankings than others. What we call netlinking, the link strategy, is one of the factors responsible for that ranking. It includes:

• Backlinks, which play a fundamental role in how a page ranks. Backlinks, or inbound links, are the links that point to it. They come from external sites. Google still filters valid backlinks by quality and trust, proximity, the type of redirect, and where the link sits on the source site.

• Internal linking, which is also among the factors that influence the crawl. These are the links that point to the same site. Internal links help a website’s SEO and also keep users active on the site by sending them to complementary information.

Content: a major element in crawl technique

It is customary to say that content is king. It does play a major role, in SEO and in the crawl. Several elements occupy a major place in this operation:

• The domain name is capital, because domains that already enjoy better rankings generate a high crawl rate. Choosing the right domain name is therefore essential.

• The sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs to index. This file is used with every CMS to tell Google about updates to the site.

• Duplicate content is among the causes of a poor crawl, and even of a search-engine penalty. Google has made it one of its priorities.

• Canonical URLs are essential if you want a better crawl and a better ranking. This is the “rel canonical” tag, which identifies the original content of a site when content is duplicated.

• Meta tags are HTML tags used to insert keywords that are invisible to users but accessible to search engines. Those keywords help a site’s organic search.

How do you crawl a website?

To crawl a website thoroughly, you can choose among several methods: “Cell text” or “Follow mode.”

First method: “Cell text”

First, sign in to your Google Search Console interface. Then open the existing sitemap. If there is no sitemap yet, create a new one. Click the “Import/Export” option above the sitemap. Choose Import, then enter your site’s URL in the empty field under “Use an existing site.” Next click the “Use File/Directory” tab so a file name and a directory appear in the sitemap label. The URL will then be used as a path, as cell text. Then click “Use H1” to include a heading in the sitemap label. Next click “Use page title.” Finally, check “Exlude common text pages on import” to set aside URLs that contain duplicated text.

Second method: “Follow mode”

After you have connected to the sitemap, click the domains and subdomains you want to crawl. If you only want to crawl the most relevant domains, select “Domain only.” Then click “Domain and directory path only” if you want to restrict access to certain specific domains. Next click “Add link” to add a URL, then “Add meta description note” to include a few notes in the meta description.

Set a number of URLs to import in the empty field under “Limit number of pages.” The Omit directory option excludes specific directories you want to avoid during the crawl. The directory is followed by an asterisk (*) if those items include subdirectories. Finally, click Import.

Why crawling matters in your strategy

Crawling your website is especially useful, both for indexing in search engines and for SEO strategy.

The role of the crawl in site indexing

Crawling a site is a decisive factor in how it ranks in Google’s organic results. Blocking exploration robots from crawling your site removes any chance of visibility in the SERP (Google’s search results).

On that point, Google has said that Googlebot can still process JavaScript and CSS files and place your site in its index. The company can also analyze the DOM, or Document Object Model (the model of a site the browser interprets from the source code) of a URL. SEO signals in the DOM are crawled and indexed. In some cases those signals can contradict the HTML. Fortunately, that small problem is being resolved.

The role of the crawl in SEO strategy

Crawling a website is now essential if you want to run an SEO audit. The crawl highlights the structural improvements a website needs. It also confirms the actions to take in order to optimize the site. The crawl reveals the site’s structure, access to pages, the sources of problems, the volume (number and categories of pages), the number of links on each URL, load time, page depth (defined by internal linking), source codes, relevant and useless URLs, and the presence and rate of duplicate content.

Discovering those main sources of imperfections lets you anticipate the fixes. A regular crawl also keeps the website healthy. This operation, offered by our SEO agency, provides useful information on competitors and lets you adapt your content accordingly.