Ranking in search engines requires a website with impeccable SEO technology and excellent, relevant content. However, if you want to get the most out of your website and stay ahead of the competition, basic technical SEO knowledge is essential. In this post, we will explain one of the most important technical SEO concepts: website crawling.
How is a website crawled?
A search engine like Google consists of a crawler, an index, and an algorithm. The crawler follows the links. When a Google crawler – also known as Googlebot – finds your website, it displays, reads, and indexes the content. The crawler tracks links on the web.
A crawler is also called a robot or spider. It is spread over the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. When it accesses a website, it stores the HTML version in a giant database called the index. This index is updated every time the crawler comes to your website and finds a new or modified version of it. Depending on how important Google considers your site and how many changes you make to your website, the crawler will be more or less noticeable.
What is site crawling?
Crawl relates to Google’s ability to review your website. You can block crawlers on your site. There are several ways to block crawlers from your website. If a website or page on your website is blocked, you tell Google’s crawler, “Don’t come here.” Your site or the related page will not appear in search results in most of these cases. There are a few things that can prevent Google from crawling (or indexing) your website:
If your robots.txt file blocks the crawler, Google will not come to your website or web page.
Before crawling your website, the crawler looks at the HTTP header of your page. This HTTP header contains the status code. If this status code indicates that the page does not exist, Google will not crawl your website. We’ll tell you everything in our Technical SEO Training HTTP Headers module.
If a bot meta tag on a particular page prevents a search engine from indexing that page, Google will crawl that page, but not index it.
This flowchart can help you understand the process you follow when trying to index a page:
How does the crawler work?
If we want to explain how a web crawler works, we must mention the nature of spider life. As you know, to create a web for its place of residence, the spider first launches vertical webs to mark the center of a certain point, and in the next step, by connecting these webs at certain points, it makes a beautiful and neat web. A web crawler works just like this.
When the crawler is busy crawling a certain website, the links on the site are seen as touchpoints for spiderwebs, and the more powerful these points are, the more the web crawler will visit the website. Below, we present some of the most popular web crawlers.
Top 10 web crawlers and bots
Today, many companies exist as manufacturers of bots or web crawlers, but below we will give the top 10 examples of these crawlers and bots.
1- GoogleBot
Google bot is one of the most popular and essential web crawlers. This Google crawler prepares a list of content for the Google search engine. Google uses this crawler to check and rank sites in search results based on its algorithms.
2- Ahrefs web crawler
ahrefs is second only to Googlebot. This tool is used to check and analyze website backlinks and has the best backlink indexes as compared to other tools. To use this tool, you must first register on ahrefs website or install its extension on your browser and then check traffic growth, backlinks, domain and url ranking, keywords, etc.
3- SEMrush crawler
semrush is another tool that uses a crawler to collect website information for analysis. Semrush is a software that all bloggers should use to improve their website and create a better experience for users.
4- SEO Spider web crawler
Screaming Frog also has a powerful crawling bot. The SEO spider has the ability to scan and crawl both small and large websites.
– Sitebulb web crawler
Sitebulb combines enterprise-level analytics with data visualization. This software is easy to use for Windows and MAC. Users no longer need to use spreadsheets or expensive dedicated software.
Hundreds of preparation tips highlighting important topics and showing what to focus on
- Visualize charts and graphs to help you understand the information
- Comprehensive Reporting provides unique and insightful reporting for each region
- Robust engine build
- The visuals cover the nitty-gritty of the basics
- Able to detect problems with the structure of the site
- Try Sitebulb’s 14-day trial to give it a try.
6- Seomator web crawler
Seomator is a tool designed to monitor and check a website’s technical and architectural specifications, then send a full report and evaluation to your email identifying areas for improvement. It is divided into two parts, off-site computation and on-page SEO, page speed features, mobile usability, and content quality, and provides all data in a unified format and structure through a report.
Offers practical warnings and advice
- URL limit
- Perfect SEO for small and medium businesses
- Including reading your SEO reports
- Seomator detects more than 65 types of problems.
7- Deepcrawl
DeepCrawl is a cloud-based web crawler that helps you analyze your website and understand technical issues to improve search engine performance.
8- OnCrawl web crawler
OnCrawl is an SEO data mining web crawler developed to analyze logs for organizational reviews and daily monitoring. This software provides an accurate and detailed picture of the impact of SEO on various website features. The user interface is very attractive and provides an insight into things in an understandable way.
9- Raventul
Raventool is designed to manage advertisement and advertising campaigns. With this tool, your business can instantly perform research and analysis, search engine tracking, and collaborate with other team members.
10- MOZ web crawler
The list of the most popular web crawlers would not be complete without MOZ. One of the most popular SEO tools for research, communication, optimization, insight, and auditing.
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