Difference between Crawling and Indexing?
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What is Crawling?
Crawling is the method used by Google and other search engines to collect data for their indexes. When search engines crawl a website, they use links to identify pages and then operate as a “headless browser,” or a browser without a screen, to record the most significant information on a page that would be visible to anyone with a screen.
If the only thing that changed was the crawler, which was previously emulating a desktop computer but now crawls with a bot that simulates a mobile browser, Google’s shift to Mobile-First Indexing could be more correctly defined as ‘Mobile-First Crawling.’
Crawlers not only follow links within a site, but also links between sites and links in XML sitemaps. Crawlers appear to follow rel=alternate style links, which are useful for bi-directional annotation, HREF Lang, and canonicals.
What is Indexing?
Indexing is the process through which search engines organise the data and webpages that they have access to. Indexing is a crucial element of the usual search engine process, because content that isn’t in the index has no chance of ranking for a search result.
Google’s most recent big shift, known as Mobile-First Indexing, allows the mobile bot to crawl and index information rather than the desktop bot.
Crawling Vs Indexing
You should be aware of one special aspect of SEO: Google can index without crawling. Weird, to say the least. Let’s look at the differences between them in more detail.
Crawling and indexing are two separate processes that are frequently misunderstood in the SEO world. Crawling is the process through which Googlebot examines and analyses all of the content/code on a page. The term “indexing” refers to the page’s eligibility to appear in Google’s search results. They don’t include each other.
We imagine Googlebot as a tour guide travelling down a hallway with a lot of closed doors. If Google is given permission to crawl a website (a room), he can open the door and look inside (crawling). Once inside the room, there may be a sign that says he’s allowed to show people around (able to index; the page appears in SERPs), or that he’s not allowed to show people around (noindex” meta robots tag; the page was crawled because he was able to look inside, but will not appear in SERPs because he’s been told not to show people around). If he’s not allowed to crawl a page (let’s pretend there’s a sign on the door that says “Google, don’t come in here”), he won’t go inside and look around, and as a result, he won’t know whether or not he’s intended to show people the room because the instructions are on the inside. So he won’t look inside the room, but he’ll show folks the room (index) and tell them they’re welcome to go inside if they wish. Even if there’s a sign on the inside of the room telling him not to let anyone in (the “noindex” meta robots tag), he’ll never see it because he wasn’t supposed to get in there in the first place.
So, regardless of whether you have a “index” or “noindex” meta robots tag within the page itself (because Google won’t be able to see it because it’s prohibited from crawling, it’s treated as indexable by default), blocking a page via robots.txt implies it’s eligible to be indexed. Naturally, this reduces the page’s ranking potential (because it can’t actually examine the content on the page, the ranking signals are all off-page + domain authority). That’s why you’ve probably seen a search result with a description like “This page’s description is not available due to robots.txt.”
To understand different features of Google Search Console, you can check out our article ‘Google Search Console : An Ultimate Guide‘.
Crawl Errors:
Crawl errors are problems that search engines have when trying to access your content. These problems prohibit search engine bots from indexing and reading your material.
Crawl Errors is also the name of a report in Google Search Console’s older version.
The Crawl Errors report is divided into two sections:
Googlebot is unable to view your complete website due to site issues.
When Googlebot is unable to access a given URL, this error occurs.
These problems are given on a URL-by-URL basis in the new Google Search Console’s Index Coverage report.
Conclusion
I hope this essay has clarified what crawling and indexing are, when and how they become independent of one another, and what the difference between crawling and indexing in SEO.
Crawling and indexing is a crucial part of the SEO process. These are the first two activities that all Digital Marketers should be aware of. We attempted to cover all of the major points of both themes.