When it comes to improving your website’s search engine rankings, one often-overlooked factor is crawlability. Without proper crawlability, search engines like Google can’t index your website correctly, which can negatively impact your rankings. So, how can you ensure your site is easily crawlable?
In Day 21 of our 30 Days of SEO Tips Series, we’re diving into what crawlability means, how to test and improve it, and tools you can use to ensure search engines can easily navigate your website.
What is Crawlability?
Crawlability refers to a search engine’s ability to access and navigate your website efficiently. If search engine bots (or “crawlers”) can’t easily crawl your site, they won’t index your content, which can prevent it from appearing in search results.
A crawlable website ensures that all relevant pages are indexed, ranked, and shown to users searching for keywords related to your content.
Why is Crawlability Important?
If your site isn’t crawlable:
- Content goes undiscovered: Search engines may miss essential pages.
- SEO efforts are wasted: Optimizing content and keywords won’t help if the pages aren’t indexed.
- Poor user experience: Non-crawlable pages may lead to broken links or errors, frustrating both users and search engines.
SEO Tip: Regularly check for crawl errors using Google Search Console.
Free Tools to Ensure Crawlability
Here are a few free tools you can use to check your site’s crawlability:
1. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free and essential tool to help you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google search results. It offers a Coverage Report showing indexed and non-indexed pages, along with any crawl errors.
- How to use:
- Sign in to Google Search Console.
- Navigate to the Coverage report to see which pages are indexed and if there are any errors.
- Fix issues such as blocked resources or “noindex” tags that might be preventing pages from being crawled.
SEO Tip: Use Google Search Console’s “Inspect URL” feature to manually test the crawlability of specific pages.
2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Free Version)
Screaming Frog allows you to crawl websites and find issues that might block search engines, such as broken links, server errors, and incorrect metadata.
- How to use:
- Download the Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
- Enter your website’s URL and run a crawl to detect issues such as 404 errors, meta robots tags, and XML sitemap errors.
3. Sitebulb (Free Trial)
Sitebulb is another website auditing tool that helps you analyze crawlability, indexability, and internal linking.
- How to use:
- Download Sitebulb and run a trial audit.
- Review the audit results for crawl issues, server response errors, or missing internal links.
SEO Tip: Crawlability is not only about individual pages but also the internal linking structure. A strong internal link network ensures all important pages are reachable.
Common Crawlability Issues and Fixes
1. Blocked by Robots.txt
The robots.txt file tells search engines which parts of your website they can and cannot crawl. If set incorrectly, it can block crucial pages from being crawled.
- How to check: Use Google Search Console or Screaming Frog to test your robots.txt.
- How to fix: Ensure that important pages are not being blocked by adding the correct rules.
SEO Tip: Avoid blocking entire sections of your site unless they are meant to remain private or unnecessary for search results.
2. Noindex Tags
Using noindex tags tells search engines not to index certain pages. While this is useful for pages like privacy policies, accidentally using noindex on important pages can cause them to be excluded from search results.
- How to check: Use Screaming Frog or manually check your pages’ source code for noindex tags.
- How to fix: Remove any unnecessary noindex tags from pages that should be crawled and indexed.
3. Broken Links and 404 Errors
Broken links lead to dead ends for both search engines and users. This can negatively affect your crawl budget, which refers to the number of pages Google crawls on your site.
- How to check: Crawl your site using Screaming Frog to identify broken links or use Broken Link Checker.
- How to fix: Update or remove broken links and use 301 redirects for any deleted pages.
4. XML Sitemap Issues
An XML sitemap helps search engines navigate and index your site. Ensure your sitemap is correctly formatted and submitted to Google Search Console.
- How to check: Visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml or submit your sitemap through Google Search Console.
- How to fix: Ensure your sitemap includes all the important pages of your site and is free of errors.
Key Takeaways
- Crawlability is critical: Without proper crawlability, your content won’t get indexed or ranked.
- Use free tools: Google Search Console and Screaming Frog can help you detect and fix crawlability issues.
- Fix errors: Pay attention to robots.txt, noindex tags, broken links, and your XML sitemap to ensure search engines can access all important pages.
Ready to boost your site’s crawlability? Start by running a quick audit today with Google Search Console, or try a crawl using Screaming Frog. Take control of your website’s SEO and ensure every page is indexed for maximum visibility.
