Crawling

The crawling or tracking of websites is the journey that a small software bot (a crawler) makes to read and analyze the code and content of a web page, jumping from one page to another through the links it finds. About GoogleBot (Google’s main software bot), it is its job to track and analyze our websites and then incorporating them into its index.

But crawling is not monopolized by the almighty search engine. Moreover they are used by other search engines for the same target, and there are also tools to crawl a website for its error checking system and its SEO score evaluating.

How does Google website tracking work? ⚙️

First of all, Google needs to know the existence of our website and its availability so that the crawler can perform the crawling and indexing process. To achieve this goal, we can work with several options, the main one being the building of an external link to that specific website or the indexing in other Search platforms.

After this point, the Google crawler will start the portal tracking process, accessing all pages through the various internal links we have created. This may also work with different sources to scan a page or a part of our website.

The Crawl Budget and how it affects SEO 📈

The Google crawler does not only exist to scan our website. Given the presence of millions of portals on the Internet, the resources GoogleBot can devote to a website are limited. Hence the Crawl Budget concept, the time and effort it will take GoogleBot to try to read and analyze the pages of a website.

If a Google crawler cannot read a page, it will not know about its existence or content and will not be able to embed it in its index. And not embedding it in the index will mean that it will not appear in search engine results pages and will not participate in the ranking of positions.

Tracking therefore becomes important in organic search engine ranking, as it is the first step for Google to analyze our website and its different pages, and then add them to its index.
And what factors can negatively affect our Crawl Budget? All those problems or limitations that make Google’s bot spend more time and resources, such as:

• High server response time
• Excessive resource loading speed
• Presence of 4xx or 5xx code errors
• Isolated or difficult-to-access pages
• Other factors that will determine the tracking budget, such as the authority of our website.