Crawling and Indexing Terms in SEO

Crawl Delay

• Time interval between successive crawl requests made by search engine bots.

Crawl State

• Current status of crawling for a website or page, indicating whether it is actively being crawled or not.

Crawl Rate

• Frequency or speed at which search engine bots crawl a website.

Crawl Budget

• The number of pages a search engine bot can or wants to crawl on a website during a specific time.

Crawl Depth

• The level of pages within a website that search engine bots crawl, such as homepage, subpages, etc.

Crawl Frequency

• How often search engine bots revisit a website or a specific page.

Crawl Efficiency

• A measure of how effectively a search engine bot can crawl a site without wasting resources on irrelevant pages.

Crawl Errors

• Issues encountered by bots while crawling a site, such as 404 errors, server errors, or DNS issues.

Crawl Prioritization

• The process by which search engines decide the order and importance of pages to crawl.

Render Budget

• Resources allocated by search engines to fully render and understand a website's content.

Indexing Rate

• The speed at which crawled pages are added to the search engine's index.

Disallowed URLs

• Pages or directories blocked from crawling using the robots.txt file.

Crawl Paths

• The routes or links bots follow within a website while crawling.

Robots.txt

• A file that provides crawl directives to search engine bots, specifying allowed and disallowed sections.

XML Sitemap

• A file that lists all important pages of a website to help bots discover and crawl them efficiently.

User-Agent

• A directive in the robots.txt file that specifies instructions for specific bots.

Log File Analysis

• Reviewing server logs to understand crawl behavior and identify crawl issues.

Fetch as Google (or URL Inspection Tool)

• A tool in Google Search Console that allows testing how Google crawls and renders pages.

Canonical Tags

• HTML tags that inform search engines about the preferred version of a page to avoid duplicate crawling.

Noindex

• A meta tag directive that instructs bots not to index a page after crawling.

Blocked Resources

• Elements like CSS, JavaScript, or images that are inaccessible to search engine bots, potentially affecting crawlability.

Soft 404 Errors

• Pages that return a valid HTTP response but display a "not found" message to users, which can confuse crawlers.

Dynamic Rendering

• A method to serve different versions of a webpage for bots and users to improve crawlability.

URL Parameters

• Query strings in URLs that can create duplicate or infinite crawling loops if not managed properly.