Googlebot is a web crawling robot whose task is to collect information from the pages of various websites and send it to Google servers to update the Google index. The presence of this robot on web pages is very important to determine the quality of the produced content. For professional and basic SEO, you must be familiar with how Google Bot works.
What is the Role of the Google robot?
In the case of the Google robot, you may come across different names that you should familiarize yourself with. This robot is also referred to by names such as crawler or spider. A web crawler is an Internet robot that systematically crawls the World Wide Web, usually operated by search engines for the purpose of web indexing. This is also called indexing or listing.
Two of the most important tasks of Google Bot include the following:
Web search engines and some other websites use web crawler software to update web content.
Crawlers process web pages and copy and load them if they find the quality of the page suitable. Then, these downloaded pages are provided to the search engine to display the page when users search. In this way, users can search more efficiently and easily access appropriate and quality content.
The Google bot crawls the web page by page continuously and without interruption, checking the pages for new links and saving the information obtained. Google uses different crawlers to index web pages, each of which originates from different locations and servers.
Explaining how crawlers work in the language of Google analysts
During an event, enthusiasts from all over the world gathered to learn about Google’s new features. John Muller, an analyst and member of the Google communication and support team, who was the instructor of this course, explained the factors affecting the behavior of the Google robot. Why Google bot sometimes crawls in a large number of pages of a site and sometimes does not do this at all in the case of another site?
First, we will learn about Google’s crawling budget, and then we will be informed about the conversations of this event and Mueller’s answers to the trainees.
What is Google’s crawl budget?
GoogleBot is the name of the Google crawler that searches web pages and indexes them for ranking purposes. But since the web is vast, Google’s strategy is that it only has the power to crawl high-quality web pages and cannot crawl low-quality web pages.
Definition of crawl budget according to Google developer page for huge websites (in millions of web pages):
The amount of time and resources that Google allocates to crawl a site is called the site’s crawl budget. Note that not everything that is navigated to your site will necessarily be indexed. Each page must be evaluated, consolidated, and reviewed to determine if it deserves to be indexed after being crawled.
Two main elements determine the crawl budget:
Crawl demand: The number of addresses that Google wants to crawl your site for.
Crawl capacity limit: What is the capacity of your server to crawl addresses without problems?
What determines the Google bot crawl budget?
At Google’s training event, one developer told John Mueller:
“We have a site with hundreds of thousands of pages, and we have observed that about 2000 of our pages are crawled by the Google bot every day. While this crawl speed is very slow for such a large site. We have even noticed that over 60,000 of our pages are either not crawled or not yet indexed. Although we have been really trying to make improvements, we don’t see the daily jump of our pages. Do you have any advice on how to raise the current creep budget?
John Mueller replied:
“According to your explanation, I see two main factors influencing this:
One reason may be the slowness of the server, which you will definitely see in the crawler statistics reports.
Therefore, the first important issue that you should look for is the speed of presenting the site pages to Google. This can affect the crawl budget of the Google bot and cause the crawler not to crawl your website.”
The second most important reason why the Google bot does not crawl many websites It is that he is not convinced about their quality in general. This is what I observe. “Especially new and start-up sites struggle with this problem.”
John Mueller further explained:
“There are so many pages added to the web every day that crawlers find them. But until they are sure the quality is good enough, they are cautious about crawling and indexing them. »
Encouragement of Google
In the continuation of his speech, Mueller pointed out another significant point and said:
“If the site is crawling well, the next thing I want to mention is what you can do to improve your website. This method can be something like encouraging users to visit the site, advertising or perhaps a temporary collaboration with someone else to increase site visits.
Also, suppose you have a business site, especially a small local business site. In that case, local chambers of commerce may be interested in linking to your website to give you a little extra information. This method is also useful in increasing the number of visitors to your site and making it valuable for the crawlers. So that when Google robots look at your website, they will say that this is a valid and acceptable small business site and we should try to index everything.
Hero keywords
Find and replace the actual keywords in the text correctly. Then, examine their performance changes in Google Analytics. This technique is also significantly effective in improving the site’s SEO and making the content valuable for crawlers.
Factors that affect the number of crawled pages
There are other factors that can affect the number of pages Google crawls.
For example, a website hosted on a shared server may not be able to serve pages quickly enough to Google. This is because there may be other sites on the server that use too many resources and cause the server to slow down for thousands of other sites on it.
John Mueller has some good advice for reminding web pages of server provider speed:
Be sure to check it after hours and at night because many reptiles crawl in the early hours of the morning. Because there are fewer visitors on the sites during those hours.”
The Reason for the importance of the Google bot
The Google robot can be considered as Google’s main tool for checking and understanding sites. Google, the most popular search engine in the world, alone greatly impacts the success of websites. Because Google provides a large amount of site traffic, it is always recommended that site SEO activities focus on the Google search engine.
It’s Google that drives users to your content, and for that, it needs two things:
First, it should be aware of the existence of your content.
Second, it should have enough information available about your content.
The Google Bot crawler is responsible for these tasks. He must first find the pages of your site and inform Google. It then helps Google connect its content to its target audience by collecting the right information.
Site optimization for Google Bot
The Google bot will find your content anyway. Maybe this makes you think that you don’t need to do anything anymore. But you should know that the sooner this happens, the more useful it is to improve the status of your content publication. Speeding up this process requires taking steps in the form of SEO. SEO includes a wide range of techniques, we will introduce you to some of the most important ones to make the work of the Google robot easier:
Make the necessary settings in the WordPress dashboard: make sure your content and site are visible to search engines.
Not using or minimizing nofollow links: Note that these links should never be used as internal links on your site.
Create a sitemap for your website: This can make it easier for crawlers to find all the content on your site. For this, you can use plugins like Yoast SEO.
Using various tools of Google Search Console: register your sitemap with the help of tools. These tools are also useful in fixing possible errors on your site, and if a problem is found, they will provide you with the necessary recommendations to fix it.
Placing a new content link on the main page of the site: According to John Muller, Google robots examine the important and main pages of the site every time they visit the site. Placing a new content link on these pages will direct the crawlers to that content and index it.
Publish content regularly: Due to the very high number of sites and pages on the web, Google robots definitely have limits and priorities for checking web pages. It is good to know that the range that the crawlers consider for checking a site is affected by the extent of the site and the time intervals of content publication. Therefore, we can conclude that the regular publication of content increases crawlers’ visits to our site, and in this way, the indexing speed of content also increases.
Of course, keep in mind that SEO does not mean following a fixed and specific method or trusting the method of a reputable site or person. SEO is a logical process that can lead to different answers depending on your problem. You can test different methods and finally use the best ones.
Check the behavior of the Google bot on your site
To check the number of times the crawlers crawled your site, you can use the log files or you can do this by visiting the Crawl Section in the Google Search Console. Also, tools like Kibana can be useful to get more advanced features to improve crawler performance on your site.
Conclusion
Certainly, the owners of all sites want their new content to be quickly indexed by search engines and to see the feedback of the content with the presence of users and the increase of visits to their site. By examining what crawlers are and how they work, we find out how effective they are in raising the rank of our content and site. So, if you want to have highly visited content, you must pay attention to the principles needed to improve the performance of the Google robot on your site. Creating new content and making technical changes on the site will increase the presence of this imperceptible robot on your site and you will get better results when searching in Google.