Crawling
Perfect. Here’s the Crawling overview page for your guidebook. It follows the same documentation structure (Q&A style, plain English, no fluff) and includes a simple Mermaid diagram to illustrate the concept.
Crawling: An Overview
Last reviewed: 2025-08-22 Who this is for: SEOs, developers, technical writers, and anyone auditing website visibility. Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of how search engines work. What you’ll learn:
What crawling is and why it matters
How search engines crawl websites
Key factors that influence crawling
A high-level view of the crawling process
What is Crawling?
Crawling is the process where search engines send automated bots—called crawlers or spiders—to discover pages on the web. These crawlers follow links, read sitemaps, and request URLs to find and understand content.
Without crawling, a page cannot be indexed or ranked. It’s the first step in the search engine workflow.
How Does Crawling Work?
Search engines maintain a huge list of known URLs, called the crawl queue. They:
Start from known URLs (submitted, linked, or previously discovered).
Fetch the page’s HTML and important resources.
Extract links to discover new URLs.
Decide which URLs to revisit and how often.
The frequency and depth of crawling depend on factors like site authority, server performance, and signals from robots.txt or sitemaps.
Why is Crawling Important for SEO?
If search engines cannot crawl your site effectively:
New pages may never be discovered.
Updates may not be picked up quickly.
Valuable content may remain invisible in search results.
Optimizing for crawlability ensures your site is accessible, efficient, and fully explored by bots.
High-Level Crawling Flow
What’s Next?
This overview introduced crawling at a high level. In the following chapters, we’ll explore crawlability, crawl budget, robots.txt, sitemaps, and log file analysis in detail.
Would you like me to also create a short checklist at the end of this overview page (e.g., “basic crawlability checks”) to give readers immediate, actionable steps before diving deeper?
Last updated
Was this helpful?