What Is A Web Crawler? (Updated 2023)

What Is A Web Crawler?

Have you ever checked your page indexing and found it is not indexed? Every page is indexed once the crawler visits your website. And if it isn’t yet, that can be because the web crawler hasn’t visited your content. Now if you don’t know what is a web crawler, this blog will guide you on that.

The web crawler works for everything you browse on the internet. Whether it’s a restaurant near you or the top-best place to visit, crawlers scan the page thoroughly.

What Is A Crawler?

Web crawlers, also known as web spiders, look into and index your content on search engines. These search engines use algorithms to operate the web crawler. Since the crawler does not just overlooks your page content, it provides other information too. So as a user, if you type a certain query on Google or any search engine, the web crawler has some information category. It checks that category and brings out the most irrelevant data on the result page a user need. So if you were wondering how you get answers when typing some query, the crawler does that.

How Do Web Crawlers Work?

how web crawler works

If you think crawling is all web spiders do, then you are yet to know more. Spiders crawl your website based on how many backlinks your content has and if search engines recognize it.

So when you post something on your web page, the spider checks out your content. Once done, it stores it in the index and sends data to the ranking algorithms to give the user a result.  If you make changes to your page, web crawlers scan it and index the updated version.

A different search engine has its web crawler. And once their crawler visits the content, they collect the data and send it to them. These search engines decide whether the content fits their parameter and whether they want to show it up when the query is searched.

Why Is Web Crawling Important For Your Site?

Web crawling is essential as it indexes your page and collects your data. If the crawler cannot scan and collect your data due to some technical reasons, your content won’t be indexed. So no matter how much you give in to your website, if it has errors, it can affect your site. If you want your website to be renowned, keep it healthy and error-free. You can use certain crawling tools available online, which will help you to examine your website thoroughly. These tools give specific information about broken links, duplicate content, page titles, etc.

Broken Links

If there’s a link on your web content that no longer exists, it is known as a broken link. If you do not remove these links, it will affect your page’s ranking in SERPs. So while updating your content, ensure to recheck the links you have interlinked.

Duplicate Web Content

Having duplicate blogs on your web page can really confuse search engines in determining which blog is more relevant to be presented. So while writing content, run-through once the topic and see if it’s already covered.

Page Titles

Keeping too short and long titles also matters to rank your page. Spider, while crawling the page, also goes through the titles, meta description, SEO, etc. It advises you to create a title for up to 60 characters and meta descriptions for up to 160 for your website.

Expand Your Web Page With Web Crawling

Since a web crawler indexes the website and collects the information written, it helps the search engine understand what every web page is about. As we mentioned, every search engine has a different content-judging parameter. To bring traffic to your web page, you need to determine what parameters your web crawler has and if it’s adhering to it.

Also, every second month, Google comes with a new SEO update. You need to know what the new update says and create content accordingly to bring maximum traffic.

Conclusion

Now you know everything about what is a crawler. There are several crawling tools available online to improve your website’s performance. Ensure you rectify the error you get on your web page, as your page can be penalized.

Author avatar
Shivani Rai