Why can’t my website be found on Google? You’ve devoted hours to producing outstanding content and designing a stunning website, and you’re certain that it’s exactly what your target audience wants. Yet when you enter your keywords into a search bar, there is nothing about your site.
It’s a common issue and one that is often due to misinterpretation of two fundamental SEO concepts – crawlability and indexability.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about making your website easy for both people and search engines to find. You want people to read your content, but the first step is making it accessible for search engine bots. In this process, crawlability and indexability are two separate but equally important steps. Knowing the difference between the two and how to optimize for each is critical for the success of your site.
What is Crawlability?
The ability of a website to be quickly found and accessed by search engine bots, also known as crawlers or spiders, is the most basic definition of crawlability. It’s the way to open up a navigable path for these bots to find all the pages on your site.
If a page is not crawlable, it can’t be found by a search engine. And if they can’t find it, they can’t index it or rank it. Crawl is indeed the very first step of your SEO journey.
What is Indexability?
The search engine determines whether to include a page in its database, or index, after it has been crawled. This is where indexability comes in.
A page can be perfectly crawlable, but if it’s not indexable, it won’t appear in search results. Indexability is your availability to rank.
The Key Difference: A Simple Workflow
To make the relationship clear, let’s walk through the process a search engine uses:
- Step 1: Discovery: A new URL is discovered by a search engine crawler, often from a sitemap, a link from another site or an internal link.
- Step 2: Crawling: The Crawler goes to the URL and reads the page content. And this is where crawlability is being tested.
- Step 3: Indexing: After processing the page content and evaluating its quality, the crawler determines whether or not to add it to the search index. This is where indexability is determined.
- Step 4: Ranking: At this point, the page is eligible to rank in search results for relevant query.
The Crucial Insight: For instance, a page with a noindex tag may be crawlable but not indexable. However, a page cannot be indexable if it is not crawlable. Indexability requires crawlability.
Common Factors Affecting Crawlability
Below are few factors to ensure that crawlers can easily access your content:
- Robots.txt file: By letting crawlers know which areas of your website they can and cannot access, this file serves as a gatekeeper. Misusing it can accidentally block important pages.
- XML Sitemaps: An XML sitemap helps crawlers to find the important pages on your site, even without internal links.
- Internal Linking: A strong internal linking structure allows bots to crawl and index all the pages on your site.
- Site Architecture: A logical site structure (such as Home > Category > Product) is beneficial for crawling.
- Crawl Errors: Any broken link or server error can make it difficult for crawlers to reach your pages.
Common Factors Affecting Indexability
Even if crawlers can locate your pages, they are required to be indexed. So what are some of the things that can prevent a page from getting indexed?
- Noindex Tags: This is an explicit command in your page’s HTML that tells search engines not to index it. This is a well known mistake that can be made by themes or plugins.
- Duplicate or Thin Content: Search engines don’t want to index multiple pages with the same content (or pages with very little content). This can confuse search results.
- Canonical Tags: These tags let search engines know which is the preferred version of a page, avoiding duplicate content issues and determining what to index.
- Content Quality: Pages need to contain unique, helpful, and useful content to turn up in the search engine index. Keyword-rich, poor-quality content could be overlooked.
- Password-Protected Pages: Pages behind a log in are also unable to be indexed by search engines as they cannot be accessed by crawlers.
How to Improve Crawlability
- Create a clear internal linking structure: Interlink your main and sub pages, all the valuable content should be readily available.
- Submit XML sitemaps: Create an XML sitemap and submit it to the Google Search Console so that it offers more clear of a pathway for crawlers about your site.
- Fix broken links: Regularly check and fix broken internal links that lead to crawl errors.
- Optimize crawl budget: Block low-value pages (such as login or archive pages) and direct crawlers to your most crucial content by using your robots.txt file.
How to Improve Indexability
- Use proper meta tags: Make sure you’re not unknowingly no-indexing a page by checking the HTML of your pages.
- Ensure unique, valuable content: Low quality duplicate content that doesn’t really add any value is not something a user wants to see.
- Manage duplicate content: Indicate which version of a page you want search engines to index with a canonical tag or you can use redirects.
- Improve page load speed: A crawler may decide not to index a page that loads slowly because it is seen as low quality, even though this is not a direct indexability factor.
Conclusion
Indexability is about inclusion, and crawlability is about access. For your website to rank, search engines must be able to locate and understand its pages.
By focusing on these two fundamental aspects of SEO, you can ensure your hard work doesn’t go to waste. Use resources such as Google Search Console to keep an eye on your site’s overall health and fix any problems. The time you spend ensuring your site is crawlable and indexable is the first, most important step in letting the world know about your content.