What is page crawlability, and why is it important for SEO?
Crawlability is the ability of search engine bots to crawl (scan) and index your web pages.
If your pages are not crawlable, they will not be indexed and will not appear in search results. So if you want your website to rank in search engines, you need to make sure it is crawlable.
There are several factors that affect crawlability, including the structure of your website, internal link structure, and the presence of robots.txt files. In order to ensure that your website is crawlable, you need to make sure that these factors are taken into account.
One of the most important factors in crawlability is the structure of your website. Your website should be easy for bots to navigate so they can index all of your pages. This means using a simple navigation system and avoiding links and pages that are too deep within the structure. You should also create a sitemap so that bots can easily find all of the pages on your site.
Pages too deep in your site architecture may not be crawled.
Another important factor in crawlability is the use of robots.txt files. The robots.txt file tells search engine bots which pages they can and cannot crawl. If you have a robots.txt file that disallows bots from crawling certain pages, those pages will not be crawled. This is why it's important to make sure that your robots.txt file is configured correctly.
The last factor is internal links. Internal links are important for two reasons: they help search crawlers find new pages on your site, and they help to improve the PageRank of your pages.
PageRank is a ranking algorithm used by Google to determine the importance of a page. The more high-quality incoming links a page has, the higher its PageRank will be.
How can you make your website more crawlable for search engines?
- Avoid deep links
- Create an XML sitemap
- Configure your robots.txt file correctly
- Use internal linking in a natural way, don't add links for the sake of artificially improving inbound links
By taking these steps, you can improve the crawlability of your website and make sure that search engines properly index it. This will help to improve your website's SEO and ensure that your pages rank well in search results. Page crawlability is an important factor in SEO, so don't overlook it!
Some common issues that can affect crawlability, and how can you fix them.
- Broken links
- Orphan pages
- Duplicate content
- Page not found (404) errors
Each of these issues can be fixed with a little effort. For broken links, you can use a tool like our broken links checker to find and fix them. Orphan pages can be found and fixed by internal linking. Duplicate content can be dealt with by using canonical tags or redirects. Page not found (404) errors can be fixed by creating custom 404 pages.