Crawling and indexing are among the most commonly used terms in search engine optimization. But what is the difference between these two terms?
Crawling
Crawling, on the other hand, is when Google bots actively crawl your site, either for the very first time prior to indexing or for the purpose of updating it. When Google as well as other search engines crawl your site, what they are doing is that they are examining all of the pages, together with the metadata. After crawling, website pages that meet the requirements of the crawlers get indexed while those pages that fall short of the requirement are completely rejected.
The crawling process starts with a list of web URLs and sitemaps provided by website owners from previous crawls. Crawlers use links on these websites to find other pages when they visit them. New websites, changes that have been made to the site as well as dead links are some of the contents that crawlers pay extra attention to.
What is indexing?
Indexing comes after crawling and entails storing the information that has been obtained from crawling in an index. This, perhaps, is a massive database of the content that has been covered by the crawlers and which it considers to be good enough to be served to the people who search.
When Google and hordes of other search engines start indexing your pages, they become searchable. It does not, however, guarantee that your site will be well-ranked. Even if you have indexed pages, you may not be on the first page of search results. This is why it’s critical to ensure that all of your content is of excellent quality and employs white-hat SEO techniques. This is the reason why business owners prefer to work with SEO experts to ensure that all or most of the ranking requirements are complied with.
Does a difference exist between crawling and indexing?
Yes, there are lots of differences between these two. Crawling is ideally a discovery process where the search engines or Google for most of the time send out their robots to go find new content on the web. With indexing, the content that has been found gets stored in a big database. Remember that there are strict criteria that Google and other search engines use to index content. This is why it helps make sure that the content that appears on your website is index able.
How SEO experts can help make your content indexed
Seeing the help of an SEO expert is the right thing to do if you desire to have high-quality content that can be indexed. High-quality content here means relevant, readable, and keyword-rich content, which, according to web crawlers, is not spam. SEO experts are knowledgeable and can move with speed to help you get the results that you need from your effort quickly.