What is Crawlability and Indexability in SEO? How to Get Your Pages Seen

You’ve done the hard part: you’ve poured your heart and soul into creating a stunning website that aligns with your core offerings and values. The UX is fully functional, the content is high-quality, and you’ve spent countless hours perfecting every little detail.

But how do you ensure that this content gets seen by organic users? To not let your hard work go unnoticed, the key is to create a website that is optimised for crawlability and indexability. 

Here, we’ll break down exactly what crawlability and indexability mean, why they’re crucial for your SEO success, and how you can make sure your pages are getting the spotlight they deserve on Google.

What is Crawlability?

In short, crawlability refers to how easy it is for search engine bots, such as Googlebot, to access and navigate the pages of your website. These bots, often called ‘spiders’, follow links on your site to discover and analyse its content. 

These fetch information from billions of web pages, and it achieves this by discovering new URLs either through internal links or via your submitted sitemap. If your site is crawlable, it means these bots can explore your pages and understand their structure in an efficient manner.

Without the ability for your site to be crawled, search engines do not have access to the information they need to evaluate your site and its content. Consequently, it has no reason to rank your site on its search results pages.  

This means that ensuring your site is crawlable is vital for your chances of gaining visibility in search.

However, having a fully functional site is only part of the equation. In order to ensure that all of your valuable pages are crawled (not just some), you need to make sure any potential barriers to crawlability, like broken links, blocked resources and poor site architecture, are removed. 

While often confused, crawlability is a separate concept from indexability. 

What is Indexability?

Indexability is the process that allows a search engine to analyse, process, and store a webpage in its database. This allows the page to appear in the search results.

Once a page is crawled by search engine bots, it must meet certain criteria to be indexed and made available to users searching for relevant terms.

Having an indexable site means search engines can not only access your content but also include it in their search index, making it visible to potential visitors. 

However, like with crawlability, there are some potential blockers to indexability to watch out for. For instance, in most cases, if pages are blocked by settings like ‘noindex’ meta tags or HTTP headers, Google will not index it, even if it was crawled. Therefore, ensuring your pages are indexable is just as crucial as making them crawlable.

5 Common Crawling and Indexability Issues (& How to Fix Them)

Various issues can hinder search engines from fully accessing and ranking your content. With this in mind, here are five commonly found crawling and indexability problems and how to fix them.

1) Thin content

Issue:

Search engines may not rank pages with very little original, or ‘thin’, content. This may include pages with just a few sentences, or pages that primarily consist of product descriptions copied from manufacturers.

Solution:

Boost your content with original research, expert opinions, or high-quality images and videos. This will not only help to increase engagement rate, but it will also make the content appear more authoritative. 

There’s also a chance that you may have a number of pages that focus on a similar topic. If you have multiple thin pages that have some overlap, consider consolidating them into a more comprehensive one.

Also, ensure that thin pages offer a valuable user experience even if they don’t have a lot of text.

2) Mobile-first indexing

Issue:

Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking. If your mobile site has speed or usability issues, it can negatively impact your search rankings.

Solution:

Ensure your website uses responsive design to adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes. In particular, make an attempt to boost mobile speed by minimising page load times, optimising images, reducing HTTP requests, and enabling browser caching.

3) Duplicate content

Issue:

In a similar vein, search engines may view your content unfavourably if they find significant amounts of duplicate content. This could be either on your own site or another site found elsewhere on the web. 

If it’s between two pages on your own site, this can confuse search engines about which version of the page is the original and authoritative one.

Solution:

There are numerous potential solutions to removing duplicated content. Depending on your situation, you may want to employ:

• Canonical tags: Use the rel=”canonical” tag to specify the preferred URL for a page if it has multiple versions. This may involve different URLs for mobile and desktop.

• URL parameters: If you use URL parameters for tracking or filtering out source traffic, use differentiated versions to avoid duplication. 

• Content consolidation: If you have very similar content on different pages, consider consolidating it into a single page.

• Noindex directives: Use the ‘noindex’ meta tag or robots.txt directive to prevent search engines from indexing pages with duplicate content.

4) Crawl errors

Issue:

For a variety of reasons, search engine bots may encounter problems while trying to access and crawl your website. This could be due to server errors, such as 404 Not Found or 500 Internal Server Error, but also incorrect robots.txt directives, or slow server response times.

Solution:

To diagnose and address crawl errors on your site, you can use tools like Google Search Console and website crawlers like Sitebulb or Screaming Frog:

• Google Search Console provides valuable insights into crawl errors, such as specific URLs affected, indexing issues, and coverage reports. It also offers tailored advice on how to resolve these issues.

• Website crawlers like Sitebulb or Screaming Frog enable real-time troubleshooting by discovering and fixing broken links and missing resources, and analysing your robots.txt file to ensure it isn’t unintentionally blocking important pages.

You can also review your server logs to identify and fix broken links. 

Meanwhile, to further reduce the risk of crawl errors, you should explore improving server response times by optimising large resources, using a content delivery network (CDN), and minimising HTTP requests.

5) JavaScript rendering issues

Issue:

Search engines like Google can render and understand JavaScript, but this happens as a secondary step in the indexing process. For JavaScript-heavy websites, especially large ones, challenges can arise if JavaScript is slow to load or inefficient. 

In such cases, Google may run out of crawl budget and prevent the search engine from fully rendering and indexing dynamically loaded content.

Solution:

If your site relies heavily on JavaScript, you can tackle rendering issues in some of the following ways: 

• Server-Side Rendering (SSR): Render JavaScript content on the server and provide a fully rendered HTML version to search engines.

• Use a JavaScript rendering service: Services like Prerender.io can help search engines render Javascript content and index dynamic content.

• Improve JavaScript performance: Optimise your JavaScript code to ensure it loads quickly and efficiently.

How to Know if Your Site has Been Crawled and Indexed

So you’ve taken all the necessary steps to make your website crawlable and indexable. But how can you know definitively if your pages are being crawled and indexed?

One of the best ways to do this is by using Google Search Console. By logging into Search Console and accessing the URL Inspection Tool, you can quickly check if Google has crawled specific pages on your site and when it last did so. 

This tool provides valuable insights into whether your pages are indexed and up-to-date with Google’s crawling activity. It also allows you to check when your XML sitemap was last read. 

It’s also important to remember that sometimes pages are either ‘discovered but not yet crawled’, as shown in the ‘Discovered – currently not indexed’ section of Google Search Console. This means Google is aware of your page but hasn’t had the chance to crawl it yet.

This could happen if Google considers the page non-critical or if there are crawl budget issues, often due to the page being similar to other low-value pages or lacking strong signals like internal links. In such cases, you can request indexing to help ensure the page gets crawled and indexed.

Likewise, the ‘Crawled – Currently Not Indexed’ status indicates that Googlebot has visited the page, but it hasn’t yet been added to the search index, possibly due to the various factors mentioned above.

Alternatively, you can also analyse your website’s log files. These files capture every request made to your site, including those from Googlebot. By reviewing the logs, you can find specific timestamps of when Googlebot last visited your site. 

Bear in mind, though, that this process requires access to your website’s logs and might need the help of a hosting provider or technical team. 

Another quick method to check if your site has been crawled is by using the ‘site:’ command in Google’s search bar. Simply type “site:yourwebsite.com,” and if Google returns a list of indexed pages from your site, it means Google has crawled and indexed your content.

Although this method doesn’t show the exact date or time of the crawl, it’s an easy way to confirm that Google has at least discovered your pages.

An example of a ‘site’ command in Google’s search bar:

The amount of results seen under the ‘Tools’ dropdown should reflect the amount of pages on your site that you expect to be indexed:

Together, these methods give you a good understanding of whether your site is being crawled by Google and how often.

Crawlability and Indexability in SEO: The Verdict

It almost goes without saying that crawlability and indexability are the foundation of any successful SEO strategy. Naturally, if search engines can’t discover, access, and index your content, your website’s visibility in search results will be significantly limited. 

By addressing common issues like duplicate content, JavaScript rendering, and crawl errors, and by consistently monitoring your site’s performance using tools like Google Search Console, you can pave the way for better rankings and more organic traffic.

Ready to take your website’s performance to the next level? Get in touch with our expert team at SEO Works to see how we can help!

FAQs

How often does Google crawl websites?

The frequency depends on factors like the site’s authority, update frequency, and overall quality. High-authority or frequently updated sites are crawled more often.

What is a crawl budget, and does it matter for small websites?

A crawl budget refers to the number of pages Googlebot crawls on your site within a specific timeframe. While it’s more critical for large sites with thousands of pages, smaller sites can still benefit by ensuring their most important pages are easily crawlable.

Does crawl budget matter for large sites, and how can it be managed?

For large websites with extensive content, crawl budget is important as Googlebot may not crawl every page if the site is too large or has limited resources. To manage crawl budget effectively, you can use robots.txt to block non-essential pages from being crawled. By doing this, you’ll be directing Googlebot to focus on the most important content. 

Ensuring your site has fast load speeds and bolstering horizontal and vertical internal links to key pages will also help to maximise the crawl budget.

Can internal linking improve crawlability?

Yes, a well-structured internal linking strategy is crucial for helping search engine bots navigate your site efficiently. It ensures they can discover deeper pages that might not be linked externally. 

Additionally, XML sitemaps play an important role in guiding search engines to important content on your site by providing a clear list of all URLs that should be crawled and indexed.