Search engines don’t magically know what’s on your website. They have to find it first. And the way they do that is through something called crawling. If you’re working on improving your site’s visibility, understanding crawling isn’t just helpful – it’s necessary.
Let’s unpack what crawling is, how it works, where things can go wrong, and what you can do to make sure search engines are actually seeing (and indexing) your content.
Crawling vs. Indexing: Two Different Jobs
Before we go any further, let’s clear something up. Crawling is not the same as indexing.
Crawling is the process of discovering pages. Indexing is the process of storing and organizing those pages.
Think of crawling as a search engine bot knocking on your website’s door and peeking inside. Indexing is when that bot decides your content is useful enough to remember and adds it to its database.
In most cases, pages that aren’t crawled don’t get indexed. And pages that aren’t indexed won’t show up in search results. That’s why crawling is the first gate to getting found.
How Crawling Actually Works
Let’s say you publish a new blog post. How does Google find it?
Here’s a simplified view of what happens behind the scenes:
- Seed URLs: Search engines typically start from known URLs collected from previous crawls, sitemaps, or external links, and expand their reach from there.
- Fetching: A crawler (like Googlebot) visits your URL, reads the content, and notes what’s there.
- Parsing: It scans the HTML and looks at metadata, text, internal links, images, and structure.
- Following links: If your post links to other pages, those links get added to the crawler’s list.
- Respecting rules: The crawler checks your robots.txt file and meta directives to see what it’s allowed to access.
- Decision time: After fetching and parsing, the page is evaluated for indexing based on technical and quality factors.
The whole process takes just seconds for a single page. But across billions of websites, this is happening constantly, with Google crawling tens of billions of URLs every day.
How We Help Clients Improve Crawlability and Results
At Lengreo, we’ve worked with a lot of companies across industries that had solid content but struggled with visibility. In many of those cases, the issue wasn’t the message or the product – it was that search engines couldn’t properly crawl and index what they had. That’s where we come in.
We don’t just audit your site and toss over a list of problems. We get hands-on. Our team dives deep into your site structure, internal linking, sitemap quality, and crawl signals. We work directly with you to remove crawl blockers, restructure pages, and make sure the content you care about actually gets discovered. From B2B SaaS to biotech to cybersecurity, we’ve helped clients shift from buried in search to showing up where it counts.
Optimizing for crawling isn’t just technical cleanup – it’s business-critical. And because we integrate with your team instead of working on the sidelines, the strategies we build together stay aligned with your goals, not just with a checklist.
Why Crawling Isn’t Automatic
You’d think that once you hit “publish,” your content would show up on Google within minutes. Sometimes it does. But plenty of times, it doesn’t.
Here are a few reasons crawling might not happen the way you expect:
- Your page has no internal links pointing to it (aka orphaned).
- Your site structure is too complicated.
- Pages are blocked by robots.txt or have noindex meta tags.
- Load times are too slow, so crawlers back off.
- You’re wasting the crawl budget on useless pages.
Search engines prioritize what to crawl based on importance and available resources. If your site isn’t giving strong signals, crawlers may not bother.
What Is a Crawl Budget And When Should You Worry About It?
Crawl budget refers to how many pages a search engine is willing to crawl on your site in a given time period. For small sites with fewer than 1,000 pages, crawl budget is rarely an issue. But for large platforms with lots of URLs, managing crawl budgets becomes critical.
Two main factors determine your crawl budget.
Crawl rate limit is how many requests per second the bot can make without overloading your server. Crawl demand is how much Google actually wants to crawl your site, based on how often it changes and how important it seems.
If your site is large and full of low-value or duplicate pages, you may be wasting budget and missing out on getting high-priority content crawled.
Signals That Influence Crawling Priority
Search engine crawlers aren’t just wandering around the web blindly. They make decisions based on signals. The stronger your signals, the better your crawling outcomes.
Here’s what matters:
- Site authority: Pages with lots of backlinks are often crawled more frequently.
- Update frequency: Fresh content gets attention. If you publish often, bots will learn to check in more.
- Internal linking: Pages that are easy to reach through your site’s structure get prioritized.
- Server health: Fast, stable servers allow for more aggressive crawling.
- Content value: Thin, duplicate, or spammy pages may be crawled less or ignored entirely.
Practical Tips to Improve Crawling Efficiency
Here’s where things get actionable. These strategies will help make your site more crawl-friendly and efficient.
Submit an XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap gives crawlers a roadmap to your important pages. It doesn’t guarantee crawling or indexing, but it helps bots discover content faster. Keep it updated and submit it through Google Search Console.
Use robots.txt But Don’t Overdo It
The robots.txt file lets you control which parts of your site crawlers can access. Use it to block low-value directories like admin pages or staging folders but be careful not to accidentally block key content.
Clean Up Broken Links
When crawlers hit a broken link, it disrupts their path through your site and can slow down indexing. It’s also frustrating for users. Run regular checks, fix or remove dead links, and keep your site structure smooth for both search engines and people.
Keep URLs Simple and Logical
Avoid URLs full of parameters or session IDs. A clean URL like yourdomain.com/blog/crawling-in-seo is easier for bots (and people) to understand than yourdomain.com/index.php?id=123&cat=seo.
Prioritize Internal Linking
Make sure your most valuable pages aren’t just floating out there alone. They should be linked from multiple parts of your site – ideally from high-traffic or top-level pages. Avoid burying them deep in your site structure. If it takes more than three or four clicks to get there, crawlers might not even bother.
Optimize Page Speed
A slow-loading page isn’t just a bad experience for users – it also wastes crawler resources. If your pages load slowly, it can reduce the crawl rate, meaning fewer pages might get crawled during each visit. Optimize your images, trim unnecessary scripts, and make sure your hosting can handle the traffic.
Use Canonical Tags Wisely
When similar or duplicate content appears on different URLs, search engines have to choose which one to index. That’s where canonical tags come in. They tell crawlers which version you consider the “main” one. It helps search engines choose a preferred version for indexing but doesn’t necessarily prevent crawlers from visiting duplicate URLs.
Types of Crawling You Should Know
Not all crawling is the same. Search engines use different approaches depending on your site and content type.
- Deep crawling: A full scan of most site pages, often during first indexing or major updates.
- Shallow crawling: Covers only key or high-priority pages.
- Freshness-based crawling: Focuses on recently updated content.
- Scheduled crawling: Happens at set intervals, based on site activity.
Understanding these patterns can help you spot whether you need to tweak your site to get certain pages crawled more often.
Common Crawling Problems (And How to Fix Them)
Even if you’ve done everything right, crawling can still run into issues. Here are some of the usual suspects:
- Blocked resources: CSS or JS files that are blocked in robots.txt may stop crawlers from rendering the page correctly.
- Too many redirects: Long redirect chains confuse bots and waste time.
- Orphaned pages: Pages that no other page links to are often skipped.
- Thin content: Pages with very little value may get crawled less or not at all.
- Infinite URL loops: Caused by parameters that generate endless variations.
Fixing these issues requires a mix of audits, testing, and cleanup.
How to Know if Your Site Is Being Crawled
Want to check if search engines are actively crawling your site? Here’s how:
- Google Search Console: Go to the “Crawl Stats” report under “Settings.” You’ll see how often Googlebot hits your site and which pages it visits.
- Server logs: These show real-time bot activity. Look for user agents.
- URL Inspection Tool: In Search Console, this tool lets you request indexing and see if Google has crawled a specific page.
If you’re seeing a lot of crawled pages but not many indexed, it could point to quality or technical issues.
Final Thoughts
Crawling might sound like a background process you can ignore, but it’s actually the first and most important step in search visibility. Without it, nothing else in SEO really matters.
It’s not about tricking Google into visiting your site more often. It’s about making your site technically sound, structured logically, and full of content worth discovering. That way, when search engines come knocking, they’ll have plenty of reasons to stick around and send more visitors your way.
You don’t need to obsess over every crawl stat. But you do need to respect the crawl process. Because if search engines can’t find your pages, neither can your customers.
