How do you make a website more crawlable?

Story Based Question

After launching your new online store, you’re excited to start driving traffic from Google. However, you notice that some of your key product pages aren’t showing up in search results. You’ve optimized your content, but you’re wondering: What’s preventing Google from finding and indexing these pages? You start researching, and you realize you might need to make your website more crawlable. So, how exactly do you improve crawlability to ensure that search engines can discover all the important pages on your site?

Exact Answer

To make a website more crawlable, ensure that your robots.txt file is set correctly, submit an updated sitemap to search engines, use internal linking to connect pages, fix broken links, and ensure your site is mobile-friendly.

Explanation

Making a website crawlable is all about ensuring that search engine crawlers can easily access and index your pages. If crawlers can’t get to your pages, those pages won’t appear in search results. Here’s how to improve crawlability:

  1. Check your robots.txt file: The robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages they are allowed or not allowed to crawl. Make sure you’re not blocking important pages. For example, you don’t want to accidentally block your product pages or blog posts from being crawled.
  2. Submit a sitemap: A sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your site, helping search engines discover your content faster. Submit this sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to make sure crawlers have a roadmap to find all your pages.
  3. Improve internal linking: Use internal links to connect your pages. This helps crawlers navigate your site and discover more pages. If you have a blog, link to relevant product pages or service pages within your blog posts to ensure crawlers find them.
  4. Fix broken links and redirects: Broken links or incorrect redirects prevent crawlers from accessing pages. Use a site audit tool to identify and fix any 404 errors or unnecessary redirects that could stop search engines from crawling your site.
  5. Make your website mobile-friendly: Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily crawls and indexes the mobile version of your site. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, crawlers might struggle to navigate it. Ensure your site is responsive and loads well on all devices.
  6. Optimize site speed: Slow websites can be difficult for crawlers to access, and they can negatively impact user experience as well. Improve your site’s load speed by optimizing images, using caching, and reducing unnecessary scripts.
  7. Use clear URL structures: Organize your URLs logically and ensure they are descriptive. A simple, clean URL structure helps both users and crawlers understand the content of the page, like: www.mystore.com/product-category/winter-jackets.

Example

Let’s say you have an online clothing store, and you’ve added a new collection of winter jackets to your site. You want these new product pages to appear in Google’s search results.

  1. First, you check your robots.txt file. It turns out you accidentally blocked search engines from crawling the “products” section of your site. You correct this and allow Googlebot access to those pages.
  2. You realize your sitemap hasn’t been updated since you launched the site. You add the new product collection to your XML sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console. Now Google knows about all your important pages.
  3. You also check your internal links. You go through your blog posts and add links to the new winter jacket collection, ensuring that search engines can easily discover the page through these links.
  4. During a site audit, you notice a few broken links on your homepage, which might be preventing crawlers from exploring your site. You fix these broken links to ensure crawlers can access every part of your site.
  5. Finally, you check that your website is mobile-friendly. Your site is responsive, meaning it adjusts to any screen size, which helps crawlers navigate and index your pages properly.

After making these changes, you find that your product pages, including the new winter jacket collection, are quickly indexed by Google and start ranking in search results. More customers find your products, and your online store grows.

By making your site more crawlable, you ensure that search engines can discover and index all your important pages, improving your visibility and SEO rankings.

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