Crawling
The process where search engine bots discover and scan your web pages.
Crawling is how search engines discover content on the web. Search engine bots (like Googlebot) follow links from page to page, downloading and reading the content they find. Think of it as a librarian walking through a massive library, picking up every book, and reading the title and contents.
The crawling process starts with a list of known URLs (from sitemaps, previous crawls, and links found on other sites). The bot visits each URL, reads the page, finds new links, and adds them to the queue. This happens continuously — Google crawls billions of pages every day.
Just because a page is crawled doesn't mean it will be indexed. Crawling is step one. After crawling, Google decides whether the content is good enough to add to its index (the searchable database). Some pages get crawled but not indexed.
You can see how Google crawls your site in Google Search Console under the "Crawl stats" report. It shows how many pages are crawled per day and how long it takes.
Why It Matters for SEO
If search engines can't crawl your pages, they can't index or rank them. Ensuring your site is easily crawlable is the foundation of technical SEO. Blocked pages, broken links, and poor site structure all prevent proper crawling.
🔍 How to Check This
Run an audit with AuditMySite to identify pages that might be blocking or hindering search engine crawlers.
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