Introduction
Is your website open for search engine bots to explore? Ensuring your website’s crawlability is a crucial step in making it visible to your audience through search engines. If a search engine can’t crawl your site, it can’t index your pages, and thus, your website will be invisible to people searching online. In this blog post, we will walk you through the steps to check if your website is crawlable.
Understanding Crawlability
Crawlability refers to a search engine’s ability to access and crawl content on a page. If a site has good crawlability, it means that search engines can access all its content easily, understand what the site is about, and index it to appear in search results.
How to Check Your Website’s Crawlability
1. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that helps you monitor and troubleshoot your website’s presence in Google Search results. It is one of the best ways to check your website’s crawlability.
After you have added and verified your website in Google Search Console, navigate to the ‘Coverage’ report under the ‘Index’ section. Here you can see any crawl errors that Google encountered while trying to access your site.
2. Robots.txt Testing Tool
The robots.txt file controls what parts of your site search engines can crawl. You can check your robots.txt file for any potential issues using the robots.txt Tester tool in Google Search Console. This tool will allow you to see whether your robots.txt file is blocking important pages from being crawled.
3. Use a Site Crawl Tool
There are several SEO tools, like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, SEMrush, and Ahrefs, which can crawl your website similar to how a search engine would. These tools can uncover a range of issues that might be affecting your site’s crawlability, such as broken links, server errors, and blocked resources.
4. Check Your Site’s Load Time
Search engine bots allocate a specific amount of time to crawl each site, known as the crawl budget. If your site takes too long to load, bots might leave before crawling all your pages. You can check your site’s load time using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights.
5. View Your Site as a Search Engine Bot
Tools like Google’s URL Inspection or Fetch as Google allow you to see your website as Google sees it. This is a great way to uncover any potential crawl issues that you might have missed.
Conclusion
Ensuring that your website is crawlable is a crucial step towards achieving better SEO results. By regularly checking your website’s crawlability, you can ensure that search engine bots can access and understand your content, improving your chances of ranking higher in search results.