Both indexing and crawling refer to the discoverability of your website on a search engine. With the likes of Google, content and keywords are some of the most important parts of SEO, but the indexability and crawlability of a website should not be ignored, at all. Today, we are talking about steps to boost your site’s indexability and crawlability, but why are they important? Let’s get into that first.
Indexability
Indexing is adding your site’s content to Google for ranking purposes.
Crawlability
This refers to how a search engine bot can scan and index your website.
These two factors should be on point for better SERPs and SEO results. If a search engine cannot crawl or index your website, it can be equivalent to your content absent from the search engine database. Something that is not present in a search engine cannot rank in the first place.
To avoid this and get your content to the targeted audience, here are 10 tips to improve your site’s indexability and crawlability.
Tips to Improve Crawlability and Indexability
Now that you know the importance of indexing and crawling, it’s time to concentrate on some elements of your website that will help you optimize these two.
1. Page Loading Speed
Keep in mind that web spiders crawl billions of web pages, and if your links are loading slowly, they will be there for a while.
Your website needs to load in a specific time frame, or the spiders will leave your site, hurting your SEO efforts and ranking. Therefore, it is essential to evaluate your page loading speed and improve it in whatever way you can.
You can upgrade your server or host, compress images/animation/videos, minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, and reduce redirects for better page loading
2. Internal Link Structure
A good SEO strategy will always have a clear site structure and internal linking. Google will have a hard time crawling a website that is disorganized. Orphaned pages will hurt your SEO, and for a search engine, the only way to find them would be from the sitemap.
To avoid this, a logical internal structure for your site would be required. A homepage that is connected to subpages, and creates a pyramid-like structure, is ideal. The subpages can then have natural contextual links.
You should also fix broken links, URL typos, 404 errors, etc. to help your crawlability.
3. Sitemap
Content optimization is a very prominent tool for many websites, and if you have recently updated your content, you can let Google know about it by submitting a sitemap to Search Console.
Google will learn about multiple web pages of your website in one go, rather than a crawler will have to go page by page in a single visit.
If you have a content-heavy website with a large number of URLs, or you keep adding pages frequently, submitting your sitemap to Google is essential.
4. Robots.txt
With a sitemap, you are letting Google know multiple web pages that you want to crawl. On the other side of the spectrum, are robot.txt files.
It tells search engines where to stop crawling. This helps in managing bot traffic and overboard requests from the bot.
What are the pages that you may not want Google to crawl? Well, it can be directories, shopping carts, or any other page that you don’t want to rank directly in search engine results.
5. Canonicalization
Canonical tags gather signals from multiple URLs to a single canonical URL. If you want Google to skip duplicate and outdated content, canonical URLs are the way to go.
However, it can backfire if the rogue canonical tags exist, and the search engine indexes the wrong web pages, instead of the pages you want to index.
For that, you may need to use URL inspection tools or hire digital marketer to do it for you. It will help you spot them and you can remove the canonical tags. You should also have canonical tags for content that is the same but in different languages, so each of them gets indexed.
6. Site Audit
There are a number of tools out there that will help you perform a site audit. Here, you will have to check your indexability rate. It is the number of pages in Google’s index divided by the number of pages on your website.
If you have an indexability rate below 90%, there may be some issues that need fixing. In your search console, go to no-indexed URLs, and audit them to find the issue. Google’s URL inspection Tool is a great way to achieve this.
Hire a digital marketing expert and be vigilant about newly published pages of your website. Make sure they are indexed and showing up on the Google Search Console.
7. Low-Quality Or Duplicate Content
If Google thinks that your content would not prove to be valuable to the searchers, it can decide not to index your content. This happens when content is poorly written with bad grammar and spelling mistakes, and content that is not unique.
See which of your web pages are not indexed, and find out if they provide answers to the queries they are addressing in their topic. If they are not providing any answer to searchers, it is time to replace or refresh that content.
Duplicate content combined with poor URL structure can confuse Google into indexing the wrong content or marking the preferred page as duplicate content. It can also be caused by session IDs, redundant content elements, and pagination issues.
Fix your tags, remove unnecessary pages, and fix the URLs with extra characters to make it easier for a search engine to crawl your site.
8. Redirect Chains & Loops
As your website will grow, redirects are inevitable. You will have to direct your users from an old page to a new and relevant one. If the redirects are mishandled, your indexing can take a hit.
If there is more than one redirect between the link clicked and the destination link, it’s a redirect chain, and that would hurt your website. Redirect loops, where a redirect leads to another redirect, and it never reaches anywhere.
Auditing tools will help you check these chains and loops. Fix them for better indexability and crawlability with the help of an expert by hiring a digital marketer.
9. Broken Links
The error that users get the most frustrated with is 404. Check your site for broken links regularly as it not only damages your crawlability but also frustrates your users.
You can use analytics, the search console, or any other tools to find the broken links and redirect them to what’s relevant. Be careful, of course, to not create loops or chains with redirects. There’s also an option to simply remove them.
10. IndexNow
IndexNow protocol allows URLs to be submitted to search engines through an API. It alerts search engines about your changes just like an XML sitemap, but faster.
It provides the spiders with a roadmap upfront, so they do not have to recheck your sitemap constantly. You just need to generate an API and submit our URL in the format required.
Conclusion
Indexability and crawlability play important roles in ranking your web pages and getting them more eyeballs. Some steps you can take to improve your site’s crawlability and indexability are to work on page loading speed, internal linking, and structure, organized sitemap, robots.txt files, canonicalization, site auditing, eliminating redirect chains and loops, fixing broken links, and using IndexNow.
Also Read: 8 Reasons Why Google+ Is So Important For Website SEO