All you need to know about Google’s web crawler Googlebot

If you’re new to search engine optimization and website marketing, you might have heard words like “web crawler”, “search engine robot”, or “search engine spider”. All of these words refer to the same thing. If your web pages answer web crawlers correctly, they will get better rankings on search engines.

All you need to know about Googlebot

What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is the name of Google’s web crawler. A web crawler is an automated program that systematically browses the Internet for new web pages. This is called web-indexing or web-spidering.

Google and other search engines use web crawlers to update their search indexes. Each search engine that has its own index also has its own web crawler. If you want to see your web pages on Google’s search result pages, Googlebot has to visit your pages first.

Google has several bots: Googlebot (desktop), Googlebot (mobile), Googlebot Video, Googlebot Images, Googlebot News. For most websites, the Googlebots for desktop and mobile are the most important bots.

How does Googlebot work?

Basically, Googlebot and other web crawlers follow the links that they find on web pages. If Googlebot finds new links on a page, they will be added to the list of pages that will be visited next. If a link does not work anymore, or if there is new content on a web page, Google will update the index.

Googlebot uses sitemaps and databases of links discovered during previous crawls to determine where to go next. Whenever the crawler finds new links on a site, it adds them to the list of pages to visit next. If Googlebot finds changes in the links or broken links, it will make a note of that so the index can be updated.

If you want to get good rankings on Google, you must make sure that Googlebot can correctly index your web pages. If web crawlers can easily crawl your web pages, you will get better results.

How to check the crawlability of your web pages

If your web pages contain errors that prevent Googlebot and other web crawlers from indexing them, you cannot get high rankings. For that reason, it is important that you check the crawlability of your web pages.

The Website Audit tool in SEOprofiler analyzes all pages of your website and it informs you about things that you have to change to make sure that Google and other search engines can crawl your pages correctly.

Overview audit tool

The Website Audit tool also shows you how to remove the errors from your pages. In addition to the actionable items that help you to fix the errors on your pages, the Website Audit Tool also parse the data to show you the most important statistics.

For example, you get statistics about internal and external links, indexability problems, an analysis of the robots.txt file of the website, statistics about the speed of the pages, the topics on the pages, security settings, and much more.

Check your web pages now

Making sure that Googlebot and other web crawlers can index your pages correctly is important if you want to get high search engine rankings. The Website Audit tool in SEOprofiler helps you to do that. If you haven’t done it yet, try SEOprofiler now:

Try the new audit tool!

Tom Cassy

Tom Cassy is the CEO of SEOprofiler. He blogs about search engine optimization and website marketing topics at “http://blog.seoprofiler.com”.