What is Crawling?

In the world of technology, crawling refers to an automated process of accessing and collecting data from various servers and websites. This process is used by search engines like Google to gather information about websites so that they can be ranked appropriately in search results.

Crawling-also known as web crawling or spidering- involves using software called crawlers or spiders which systematically browse through pages on the internet, following links between them and gathering data along the way.

This process enables search engines to keep their databases up-to-date with changes made to websites, including new pages being added or old ones removed. In essence, crawling forms a fundamental basis for how we navigate and find content online today.

How Does Crawling Work?

The entire crawling process starts with a list of URLs which are given to crawlers. These URLs are basically starting points for web crawlers from where they begin working on discovering other related URLs using links present in each page's content.

Crawlers usually follow every link present within a website (internal linking) but also links pointing towards other domains (external linking). The visiting URL’s content is then fetched by bots who saves particular pieces of information such as webpage title, description text etc.. Some important factors that bots are looking at while fetching information include metadata about webpage(e.g.title tag), headers/content structure & keyword distribution across pages(content relevance).

Why Is Crawling Important For SEO?

Crawling helps optimize SEO efforts by giving marketers insight into how search engines view their websites. Search engine optimization determines whether your site appears at the top of relevant searches when people look for queries you want your business to appear for over time without paying money per click!

To improve ranking desired phrases or keywords on the search engines, it's essential to know how they are crawled and indexed by these automated programs. These programs even follow through with hyperlinks both internal (to your site) or external from other pages towards your website, searching for additional related content.

Issues With Crawling

Some slow and high latency caused issues with crawling as additional time required to access the website but can recover in later crawls of a website.

Crawlers usually encounter errors while fetching details about web pages like 404 (page not found error), nofollow links, inaccessible content or captcha protection. Such errors make it difficult for bots to crawl the entire site properly which makes important information unavailable and this way negatively impacts SEO.