Crawling, Indexing & Ranking: Know How Search Engines Work

Crawling, indexing and ranking are Google’s ways of finding pages across the web and adding it to its database to display as and when a user query comes up.

Billions of questions are being asked across search engines every single day. Google dominates the search engine market with a massive market share of 92%, followed by Bing (3%), Yahoo (1%), Yandex (1%) and others.

But have you ever thought about how search engines fetch results that answer your queries?

That’s where crawling, indexing and ranking come into play. 

In this write-up, I’ll walk you through everything about this trio: crawling, indexing, and ranking in SEO, why it is important and how you can get search engines like Google to perform it on your website.

Come on in.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines systematically perform these 3 functions: crawling, indexing and ranking. So, what is crawling, indexing and ranking in SEO?

• Crawling – Search engine spiders constantly crawl web pages across the internet, often using links on existing pages to find new pages.
• Indexing – Once a page is crawled, search engines add it to their database. For Google, crawled pages are added to the Google Index.
• Ranking- After indexing, search engines rank pages based on various factors. In fact, Google weighs pages against its 200+ ranking factors before ranking them.

I’ll break down these three search engine functions in detail in the upcoming sections. Keep reading.

Crawling

What is Search Engine Crawling?

Crawling is the process where search engine bots (AKA crawlers or spiders) discover new or upgraded content. 

The content can be anything, including an entire web page, text, images, videos, PDFs and more.

Irrespective of the content format, major search engines can easily crawl the content by following links.
It all begins with the search engine spiders crawling a few pages. Then, they just hop along the path of the URLs they find on these pages and the pages that follow.

Every time search engine bots find and crawl a new page, they add it to the specific search engine’s inventory. In the case of Google, Google bots add fresh pages to the Google Index.

Understanding Crawling Misconceptions

There’s a common misconception that more frequent crawling by Googlebot automatically signals higher site quality. However, as discussed in a recent Google Search podcast, this isn’t always the case.

Increased crawling can sometimes indicate issues such as infinite spaces or server misconfigurations rather than an endorsement of quality content. For instance, if your site includes a calendar module or infinitely filterable product listings, these elements can generate endless URLs that excite crawlers temporarily but do not necessarily contribute to your site’s quality.

It’s crucial to understand that while crawling is essential, it’s equally important to ensure that the pages being crawled offer valuable content to users.

Types of Crawling

Google uses two types of crawling.

• Discovery Crawl- The Google bot tries to find out and crawl new pages on your site
• Refresh Crawl-  Google crawls your content to update existing pages in its index.

Let’s say one of your main pages is already indexed by Google. 

The search engine is likely to perform a refresh crawl on that particular page and if it spots a new link, it will use its discovery crawl capabilities to crawl the pages that follow.

As Google’s John Mueller puts it, “ for example, we would refresh crawl the homepage, I don’t know, once a day, or every couple of hours, or something like that. And if we find new links on their homepage, then we’ll go off and crawl those with the discovery crawl as well.”

Google also delves deep into search engine crawling in a recent episode of How Search Works, an educational series featured on Google Search Central. 

In this video, Gary Illyes, Analyst at Google, says, “Most new URLs Google discovers are from other known pages that Google previously crawled.You can think about a news site with different category pages that then link out to individual news articles. Google can discover most published articles by revisiting the Category page every now and then and extracting the URLs that lead to the articles.”

This statement from Illyes adds more substantiation to what Mueller explained previously. Most often, Google does leverage known URLs to navigate to new pages. 

So, it is important to establish a connection between your crawled pages and new ones. This way, you can stop your new page from being undiscovered by Google.

What is a Crawl Budget?

Now that you know what search engine crawling is, let’s dig deeper.

You want search engines to find as many of your indexed pages as possible. That’s why the crawl budget is important.

So, what is this crawl budget?

The crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine spider can crawl within a specific time period. 

Once your crawl budget is exhausted, the bot will stop crawling your site and move on to crawling other sites.

The crawl budget is automatically determined by the search engine and it varies from one website to another.

Google uses two factors to determine it.

• Crawl Rate Limit – The speed at which Google can fetch your website’s assets without affecting its performance. Using a responsive server can often result in a higher crawl rate.
• Crawl Demand – The number of URLs Google follows during a single crawl based on demand. It depends on the need for indexing or reindexing pages and the popularity of a site.

Crawl Budget Optimization: Beyond the Numbers

Focusing solely on the number of pages crawled can lead to a misunderstanding of what truly benefits your site. It’s not just about the quantity of pages crawled but the quality and relevance of those pages.

For example, if your website has outdated or duplicate content, Googlebot may waste valuable crawl budget on these pages, reducing the efficacy of your SEO efforts. To optimize crawl efficacy, regularly update your important pages and use tools like Google Search Console to monitor how Googlebot interacts with your site.

What is Crawl Efficacy and Why Does it Matter?

Most people think crawling is just about the crawl budget.

But, is it?

Nope. There’s more to the story.

When you focus on the crawl budget, you only care about the number of your web pages the search engine crawls.

But why should you care about the number of crawls when it is spent on pages that haven’t altered ever since the last crawl?

That doesn’t give you any SEO benefit.

That’s why it’s time to look beyond it and pay attention to crawl efficacy.

Now, what’s crawl efficacy?

It is how quickly the search engine bots can crawl your web pages. The time between your pages being created or revamped and the next crawl; that’s crawl efficacy.

The minimum the time taken for the crawler to visit or revisit your page, the better.

You can use reports in the Google Search Console to find out how often the search engine crawls your site.

What Determines Your Site’s Crawling Speed?

The crawling speed is unique to every website. But how does Google decide how frequently it will crawl your site?

In general, Google bot is designed in such a way that it avoids crawling too fast to prevent overloading.

Google’s crawling speed for your website often depends on 

• How fast the site reacts to individual requests by Google bot.
• The quality of your content.
• Potential server errors and other signals

Googlebot renders pages by running the Javascript it finds using the latest version of the Chrome browser. That’s how Google will be able to view and crawl the content on your web page.

Note: Google spiders only crawl pages that are publicly accessible and not those that require logins. So, make sure you provide public access to the pages that you want Google to crawl.

How to Get Google to Crawl or Re-Crawl Your Pages Faster?

So, how do you get Google to crawl your pages faster? Here you go.

Improve URL Importance

Increasing the importance of certain URLs is one of the best ways to get them crawled faster by Google.  

So, what makes a URL important?

URL importance on two factors.

• The number of links pointing to the URL
• How often the page is refreshed

If your page has several backlinks pointing to it and your content is updated frequently to maintain freshness, then it is likely that the search engine bots will crawl your page often.

Acquire backlinks from established websites that are relevant to your niche. This way, when Google finds other trusted sites in your industry vouching for you, it will increase your site’s authority.

Refresh the content of your pages that you want Google to crawl. This way, you stop the content from going outdated and add value to your users by offering them up-to-date information about a particular topic.

Together, they will improve the significance of your pages in Google’s eyes and prompt it to crawl or re-crawl them faster.

Include Sitemap

A sitemap is a list of pages on your site that you want the search engine to discover easily. 

Creating a sitemap and submitting it through the Google Search Console is one of the best ways to get Google to crawl your high-priority pages. 

Again, Illyes explains, “Sitemaps are absolutely not mandatory, but they can definitely help Google and other search engines find your content.” He also recommends webmasters work with developers and make sure that their content management systems can generate sitemaps automatically.

This way, you can make sure that the search engine bots take the quickest path to your important pages.

Utilizing Advanced Crawling Controls

While sitemaps are essential for guiding Googlebot to your important pages, utilizing other advanced crawling controls can also be beneficial.

For example, if your site has multiple URL parameters that generate similar content, this can confuse crawlers and lead to inefficiencies. Although Google removed the URL parameter handling tool due to low usage, understanding how URL parameters affect crawling is still crucial.

Ensuring that your URLs are clean and parameter-free wherever possible can help improve crawl efficiency and avoid unnecessary duplication.

Use Robots.txt

By default, search engine crawlers assume that every web page across the web is freely available for crawling. That means they will try to crawl all the pages on your website.

But then, allowing Google bots to crawl all your pages, including duplicate content and other less significant pages, will drain your crawl budget before they get to your important pages.

And the result? Google will postpone crawling the rest of your pages to a later time. This will, in turn, cause a delay in crawling and indexing of your significant pages.

If this condition persists, it will affect the crawl efficacy of your site, which means Google bots will take more time than they usually do to visit or revisit your pages for crawling. The sooner you solve this problem, the better it is for your website.

Quicker crawling is possible, not just by letting Google know the important pages on your site. Telling the search engine which parts of your site you don’t want it to crawl is also equally important. 

You can use the robots.txt file to control the crawling mechanism of the bots to some extent. By doing so, you can help Google to crawl your site efficiently. 

Build Internal Links

Search engines often follow links to find new pages on a site.

So, whenever you create a new page or publish new content, make sure you link back to it from a relevant page on your site. 

This way, when the crawler revisits your existing page on its database, it will discover and crawl your new page.

Acquire Powerful Backlinks

As I said earlier, backlinks are paramount to get Google to crawl or re-crawl your pages faster. Earn backlinks to your page from other websites relevant to your niche. 

So, when the Googlebot crawls the content in which you’ve placed a backlink, it will get redirected to your page and will crawl it.

Unlike internal links, these links are built from third-party websites to your own.

Make sure you choose authoritative, industry-specific sites to build backlinks to your site. Once done, get in touch with corresponding webmasters to offer guest post contributions to their sites so that you can get a backlink from their site to yours in return. 

Ensure that you create high-value, user-engaging content and use the right anchor text to place your backlink. This way, you build high-quality contextual backlinks that will drive qualified referral traffic to your site. 

These backlinks will contribute to increasing the URL importance of your web pages. Again, boosting URL importance makes way for quicker crawling.

Avoid Crawl Budget Exhaustion

As I mentioned earlier, once your crawl budget gets drained, the search engine bots stop crawling your site and decide to come back to it later.

This often means there are still assets that are not crawled by Google on your site. 

Make sure you use canonical tags to stop Google spiders from crawling your duplicate pages, which may otherwise lead to crawl budget wastage.

Leverage pagination attributes, including rel= “next”  and rel= “prev” tags to help Google make sense of the relationship between your pages.

But BEWARE: incorrect pagination may backfire and end up stopping the search engine from crawling and indexing your important pages. Make sure you consider pagination best practices to avoid potential issues.

Fix Soft 404 Errors

In Google’s perspective, not all 404 errors are the same. 

While hard 404 errors signal that the requested pages don’t exist, soft 404 error pages return a 200 OK status code and that results in the search engine crawling those pages. This is certainly a waste of the crawl budget.

Ensuring that all your 404 errors return the correct status code can prevent unnecessary crawling and improve your site’s overall crawl efficacy.

Avoid Paywalled Content

Google is not likely to crawl pages that provide restricted access to its content.

So, do not paywall your important pages.

Google-Recommended Ways for More Crawling

In a recent podcast, Google’s Gary Illyes and Lizzi Sassman discussed three factors that encourage Google bots to crawl your website more. Although they deemphasized the need for constant crawling, they acknowledged the factors that will increase the crawl rate. 

Here are the three factors explained in detail.

High-Quality Content 

Gary Illyes explains that the high-quality content detected by Google triggers a high level of crawling.

In his exact words: “…generally if the content of a site is of high quality and it’s helpful and people like it in general, then Googlebot–well, Google–tends to crawl more from that site…”

Despite the above statement, he hasn’t mentioned how Google determines the content quality and helpfulness that will trigger Google to crawl more.

We can’t expect Google to reveal it, but we can speculate and guess.

Let’s take Google’s NavBoost system, which has been around since 2004 . Based on the user’s interaction and preferences, the search engine can adjust the results to provide relevant information to the user.

When more people click on your link, stay on your web page reading your content for a longer period, and click on the internal links and explore more, Google considers your content high-quality and helpful.

However, a common misconception about the Navboost patent is that it’s all about CTR and clicks. No, It’s not. It’s about the user’s interactions and preferences.

If you understand your audience better and give them what they want, that can signal your content as helpful and high-quality and improve the crawl frequency.

Frequent Publishing Activity

If a site’s publishing activity suddenly increases, Googlebot could crawl more.

Gary Illyes mentioned that if a site is hacked and publishes more pages, Googlebot will crawl more.

Here are his exact words: “…but it can also mean that, I don’t know, the site was hacked. And then there’s a bunch of new URLs that Googlebot gets excited about, and then it goes out and then it’s crawling like crazy.”​

When a hacker hacks a website and injects spam into it, the crawler interprets it as new content, gets excited about it and crawls crazy.

Now, let’s step back and look at it. What if the site isn’t hacked? What if you start publishing new content more often? Simple: Googlebot gets excited and starts crawling your site more. That says it all.

Consistency of Content Quality

The third and final factor is the content quality consistency. 

Here is what Gary said:

“…if we are not crawling much or we are gradually slowing down with crawling, that might be a sign of low-quality content or that we rethought the quality of the site.”

So, we can assume from this statement that he refers to the three crucial factors—content quality, topicality, and relevance to users over time—as important considerations that will keep the Google bots coming back to your site.

If there is a drop in any of the factors, then it could affect Googlebot crawling and ultimately impact how Google regards your content.

So, do a regular content audit and check if your content is updated and still relevant to your users.

What If Google Crawls Your Site A Lot? Is It Good Or Bad?

Now you know what determines your site’s crawling speed and how you can get Google to crawl your page faster.

But what if Google aggressively crawls your website?

Is it good? Or bad?

In a recent LinkedIn post, Gary Illyes, a Google analyst, wrote, “A sudden increase in crawling can mean good things, sure, but it can also mean something is wrong.”

Following that, he warns us to watch out for two common problems: 

• Infinite Spaces
• Website Hacks

Let’s delve deeper into it.

Infinite Spaces

Illyes writes, “You have a calendar thingie on your site or an infinitely filterable product listings page. If your site generally has pages that search users find helpful, crawlers will get excited about these infinite spaces for a time.”

The calendar modules and product listing pages can generate unlimited potential URLs, which act as infinite spaces and excite the crawlers.

Let’s look at them in detail.

Calendar Thingie

A “calendar thingie” is a website module or feature that generates unique pages and URLs for different dates. 

Impact of Calendar Thingie

• Crawling Overload: These URL pages will distract and divert search engine crawlers from crawling your most important pages, wasting your crawl budget on these low-value pages.
• Increase Server Load: Excessive crawling will increase the load on your server and slow down your website.
• Affect Ranking: Since website speed is a ranking parameter, a slow server can affect your website’s ranking.
• Index Bloat: As the number of crawled pages increases, search engines can index unimportant pages and leave your important pages hanging.

Infinitely Filterable Product Listing Pages

Infinitely filterable product listing pages are nothing but a feature that allows users to apply numerous filters to view products.

Each combination of filters can generate unique URLs, leading to endless pages.

Impact of Infinite Filterable Product Listing Pages

• Crawl loop: With the number of unique infinite filterable product listing pages, the crawler can get stuck in an infinite loop, crawling these unimportant pages and neglecting the crucial ones.
• Duplicate content: These infinite pages can create significant amounts of duplicate or near-duplicate content, confusing search engines and negatively impacting ranking.
• Index Bloat: The infinite pages will drain the crawling budget and divert it from ranking more valuable pages.

To block the crawler from accessing these infinite spaces, Illyes recommends using the “robots.txt” file.

Website Hacks

Hackers are always a serious threat.

Here Gary Illyes writes, “If a no-good-doer somehow managed to get access to your server’s file system or your content management system, they might flood your otherwise dandy site with, well, crap.”

Hackers can breach your security system and inject spam into your website. As a result, the crawlers will interpret them as new content and keep crawling.

When a hacker injects it into your website, your website’s user experience, credibility, rankings and traffic will be affected, and to an extent, even your website can get penalized by Google or other search engines.

How do you fix your hacked site?

To retrieve your hacked website, here is a video from Google Search Central that explains the complete process.

Here is the summary of that video:

Identify the Issue

Use tools like Google Webmaster to identify the problem. Before you start the recovery process, you need to know how the hacker got access to your website.

Fix the Issue

Once you identify the loophole, close it to prevent future authorization. It could include password updates, security updates, software updates, etc.

Remove the Hacked Content

Remove spam, malware, vandalized pages, and other threats hackers inject. 

Tighten the Security

Take additional precautions to avoid future troubles from hackers. These can include strong security passwords, limiting users, software updates, and changing web hosting.

Request A Review

Once you have fixed all the issues and improved your website’s security, request Google to review your site and remove warnings or blacklists.

Indexing

What is a Search Engine Index?

Once a search engine crawls one or more pages, it will process the information and store it in a vast database. That database is a search engine index.

Think of it as a destination that contains all the web pages that the search engine has discovered across the internet.

Why is Search Engine Indexing Important?

Whenever a user query occurs, the search engine returns to its index to fetch relevant information.

So, for the search engine to show up your page for relevant search queries, it should have been added to the index.

In another video in the “How Search Works” series, Google’s Gary Illyes explains how Google indexes web pages.

He says, “Once the page has been crawled, the next step is figuring out exactly what’s on the page and determining some signals whether we should index the page.”

That means Google does have a filtration process in place in the indexing stage before it ranks web pages.

During indexing, Google will analyze the textual content, images, videos, tags and attributes of the page in question. Besides, the search engine will also consider various signals that it will leverage to rank the page in search results.

The search engine scrutinizes page quality during indexing to determine whether or not to index the page. Google calls it index selection.

Speaking of index selection, Illyes explains, “it largely depends on the quality of the page and the signals that we (Google) previously collected.” 

Alright. What are these signals?

Google leverages direct signals like the rel= “canonical” and many other complex signals across the web when indexing web pages.

Google also employs the duplicate clustering technique where it groups similar pages to pick a single canonical version to represent the content in SERPs. Again, the search engine determines the canonical version by comparing the quality signals it has gathered about each of the duplicate pages.

Apart from discussing quality signals for indexing, Google also offers other insights. This information is critical for webmasters and SEOs who are struggling to get their web pages indexed by Google.

Check it out below.

HTML Parsing

When indexing, Google will analyze the HTML codes of your web page. If it finds unsupported tags, it will forcibly close the elements right before that specific tag. As a result, Google will render these elements useless for indexing purposes.

This can cause potential indexing problems for your page. So, make sure your HTML codes are rightly placed and that there are no distortions.

Main Content Identification

When indexing your page, Google primarily focuses on your main content or what Illyes calls the centerpiece of a page. 

The search engine intends to index a single canonical version of your page while eliminating the duplicates. These duplicate pages end up being alternates that Google will only show up for very specific user searches.

Make sure you carefully optimize the page you want Google to index so that the search engine better understands which page to prioritize when indexing.

Index Storage

If a canonical page gets indexed, Google will save all the information it collected about the page and its cluster in the Google Index.

Whenever a user query comes in, Google will return relevant results in SERPs.

Making sense of what Google expects to see during indexing will help you meet its standards and take a sure shot at getting your page indexed.

How Long Does it Take for a Page to be Indexed?

If you run a website, you probably know how disappointing it will be to know that Google hasn’t indexed an important page on your site.

If you are someone who’s just launched your website, it can be particularly frustrating to find out your page isn’t indexed yet.

It may take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks for a page to get indexed.

If you think the search engine is taking too long to index your page, there are ways to speed it up.

How to Know If Your Page is Indexed (or Not Indexed)?

Before talking about how you can get Google to index your page, you need to double-check if your page is indexed.

Here’s how.

Visit Google and perform a search using this format; site:yoursite.com. 

Google will display all the pages on your site that are indexed.

If you don’t see results or don’t find a particular page among the results, then your site or a specific page isn’t indexed. 

Alternatively, you can also use the Google Search Console to check if your page is indexed.

How to Get Your Content Indexed Faster?

Tired of waiting for Google to index your content? Here’s how you can get the search engine to index your page.

Remove Low-Quality Pages

When the Google bot crawls your site, it is likely to crawl all your pages, including low-quality pages.

This will exhaust your crawl budget and will affect the crawl efficacy too.

So, make sure you remove pages with low-quality pages.

This way, you prompt Google to crawl and index your important pages rather than spending time on your assets that aren’t as important.

Don’t Let Your Page be Orphaned

Orphaned pages are often at risk of going unnoticed by search engines.

As you know, Google discovers new pages by following links.

Make sure you link your content to relevant pages and build a robust site architecture.

This way, there’s a higher probability that Google will discover your pages easily and index them.

Request Indexing Through the Google Search Console

Google automatically crawls and indexes pages across the web. However, there’s no guarantee that no page will escape Google’s notice.

That said, if you find that Google still hasn’t indexed your site, you can manually request Google to index your site through the Google Search Console.

Google is the biggest player in the search engine market. That’s why it is essential to be indexed and ranked by Google to gain improved online visibility.

However, Google isn’t the limit.

Apart from the Google Search Console, you can also leverage the consoles of other search engines like Bing and Yandex.

Getting multiple search engines to index your site can open up multiple web traffic pipelines for your website.

Tired of waiting for Google to index your site? Let us take care of it. Try our fully managed SEO services.

Ranking

What is Search Engine Ranking?

Following the crawling and indexing of web pages, the search engine ranks them based on various search engine algorithms and ranking factors.

Google keeps coming up with algorithm updates from time to time in order to equip itself to fetch better results that answer user queries.

As for the ranking factors, Google uses 200+ ranking factors to determine how and where to position sites to user search queries. 

Optimizing your site to align with these parameters will help you rank better. The higher your site ranks, the better its online visibility.

How to Boost Your Search Engine Ranking?

On-Page and Off-Page Optimization

Paying close attention to on-page SEO elements, including meta tags, headings and content optimization and off-page SEO elements like backlinks can help boost your site’s rankings.

The higher your website appears on the search results, the higher the chances of people clicking on it.

This will increase the organic traffic flow to your website.

Content Quality and Relevance

High-quality, user-engaging content is a must-have to achieve top rankings.

But how do you know what your potential clients are looking for?

After all, there’s no point in creating content that nobody wants to read.

Conduct focused keyword research to find out what people are looking for from businesses like yours.

Shortlist your keywords based on search volume and competition.

Come up with content ideas around those keywords. They can be anything from blog posts to social media posts.

Make sure you use your content to address customer pain points effectively. That’s how you can establish your expertise and position yourself as an authority in your industry.

Once Google finds out you are an authority in your niche, it is likely to give you an incredible SERP boost.

Can’t get your client’s site rank higher? We got you covered. Check out our SEO reseller services.

User Intent

The primary aim of search engines is to fetch the best answers for user queries. That’s why keeping user intent in mind is important.

Suppose you own a website selling mobile phones. If you want to rank for “how to buy the best smartphones”, for example, you need to create a blog post that provides tips on how to buy the best mobile phone in the market.

On the contrary, using the keyword to drive traffic to one of your e-commerce pages will NOT help you rank better.

That’s because a commercial page is not what the user wants to see when clicking on one of the search results.

They rather prefer pages that educate them on how to buy the best smartphone. 

That said, understanding user intent and creating content that meets it is imperative to rank higher on search engines.

Technical SEO

Ignoring the technical aspects of search engine optimization can affect your search rankings considerably.

Pay attention to the technical part of SEO, such as removing duplicate content or adding canonical tags, including schema markup, improving your site’s page loading speed, fixing broken links and redirects and more.

With proper implementation of technical SEO, you make it easier for both the search engine and your users to access your site in a hassle-free way.

Optimize Your Site For Mobile Devices

With Google prioritizing mobile-first indexing, it is essential to optimize your site for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Though the search engine will consider the desktop version of your site for ranking, if you don’t have a mobile version, it will be a serious setback for you.

With mobile-first indexing in place, other sites with a mobile-optimized version will easily outperform you as Google prefers ranking them higher. 

 Need help optimizing your site for faster indexing and ranking? Contact us today.

FAQ’s

Q. What’s the difference between indexing and crawling?

Indexing and crawling are two separate processes. Without crawling, indexing won’t take place.

Here is the difference between indexing and crawling. Crawling means discovering new or old pages. Whereas, indexing means storing them in the relevant database to show them as results for appropriate queries. Basically, Google crawls a page first and then adds it to its index.

Q. What is Google Indexing in SEO?

Google indexing in SEO involves search engine bots analyzing texts, images, videos, and other forms of content on a web page and storing them in Google’s database.