Site crawling is a crucial aspect of SEO, and if bots can’t crawl your site effectively, many important pages may not get indexed in Google or other search engines. This article will provide you with nine solid tips to increase the Google crawl rate of your website, ensuring better visibility and indexing.
Key Takeaways
Interlinking your blog pages can significantly improve crawl efficiency.
Regularly publishing new content keeps your site fresh and encourages more frequent crawling.
Ensuring good server uptime is essential for maintaining accessibility for crawlers.
Creating and submitting sitemaps helps search engines understand your site structure.
Optimizing images and using alt tags ensures that all content on your site is crawlable.
1. Interlink Your Blog Pages Like a Pro
Interlinking not only helps you to pass link juice but also helps search engine bots to crawl deep pages of your site. When you publish a new page, interlink it from old pages, and this helps search engines discover new pages quickly. Internal linking is an underrated SEO tactic that can boost performance with minimal effort.
How to Build Internal Links Effectively
Use relevant anchor text that naturally fits into your content.
Link to older posts that are still valuable and relevant.
Make sure your links are do-follow to pass on the link juice.
Tools to Help You Interlink
LinkWhisper Plugin for auto link building.
Yoast SEO for internal linking suggestions.
Benefits of Interlinking
Helps in passing link juice.
Aids in faster indexing of new pages.
Improves user experience by providing additional reading material.
Interlinking is a simple yet powerful way to improve your site’s SEO and user experience. Don’t overlook it!
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Overloading your content with too many links.
Using irrelevant anchor text.
Linking to low-quality or outdated content.
2. Publish New Content Regularly
Creating fresh content regularly is crucial for improving your website’s crawl rate. Sites that update their content frequently are more likely to get crawled more often. This means you should aim to add new pages or blog posts at least three times a week. Blogs are the easiest and most affordable way to produce new content on a regular basis. But don’t stop there; you can also add new videos or audio streams to your site.
How to Maintain Blog Post Frequency
Have one or several sections of your website that are updated on a regular basis. The more often, the better.
Make sure the updates and articles are relevant and have a fair amount of new information and images.
Create social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and update them often with links to your site.
Create a YouTube channel with videos and have links from those to your site. Make sure the videos are relevant to your subject and contain useful information.
For larger sites, optimizing crawl budget can greatly raise the profile of previously invisible pages. While smaller sites need to worry less about crawl budget, maintaining a regular content update schedule is still beneficial.
3. Server with Good Uptime
Hosting your blog on a reliable server with good uptime is crucial. Nobody wants Google bots to visit their blog during downtime. In fact, if your site is down for long, Google crawlers will set their crawling rate accordingly, and you’ll find it harder to get your new content indexed faster.
Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider
There are many good hosting sites that offer 99%+ uptime. You can look at them on suggested WebHosting pages. Personally, I prefer to use Kinsta hosting, and it has served me really well for the past 6 years.
Implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN distributes your site files across a global network, ensuring faster page loads from anywhere. This not only improves user experience but also helps in maintaining good uptime.
Monitor Server Performance
Regularly check your server’s performance. Use tools to monitor uptime and get alerts for any downtime. This proactive approach helps in quickly resolving any issues that might affect your site’s availability.
Pro Tip: Choose a lightweight, high-performance web hosting plan appropriate for your needs. Cheap, low-quality hosts can bottleneck your speeds.
Enable Compression
Enable compression to minimize the file size of your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other assets. This helps in reducing load times and ensures that your server can handle more traffic efficiently.
4. Create and Submit Sitemaps
Creating and submitting a sitemap is one of the first steps to make your site discoverable by search engine bots. In WordPress, you can use SEO plugins like Yoast SEO to generate a dynamic sitemap and submit it to the Webmaster tool.
How to submit sitemap to Google Search engine
Go to Google Search Console.
Sign in to Google.
Select Add a Property.
Verify property using Google Analytics.
Navigate to Crawl > Sitemaps > Add/Test Sitemaps.
Enter
sitemap.xmland select publish.
Types of Sitemaps
HTML sitemaps: These are geared towards helping visitors navigate through your site. You need an HTML sitemap to make your site user-friendly.
XML sitemaps: These are text files that include all of your website’s URLs and metadata. XML sitemaps help search engine bots crawl your site more efficiently.
Sitemaps help you target your SEO efforts and keep site navigation organized, intuitive, and simple.
One of the key aspects of setting up Google Search Console is creating and submitting a sitemap. A sitemap is essentially a roadmap of your website that leads search engines to all your important pages. It’s important to submit your sitemap to Google via Google Search Console or through other methods like the Search Console API or inclusion in the robots.txt file.
5. Avoid Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a big no-no if you want to increase your Google bot crawl rate. When search engines detect duplicate content, they tend to avoid showing it, which can hurt your Domain Authority. Instead, focus on creating original material that adds value to your audience. Stay away from duplicate content to ensure your site ranks higher and gets crawled more frequently.
AI Content Writing Risks
Using AI to generate content can be tempting, but it comes with its own set of risks. AI-generated content can sometimes be flagged as duplicate, especially if it’s not unique or well-optimized. Always review and edit AI-generated content to make sure it adds unique value.
Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization happens when multiple pages on your site target the same keyword, leading to duplicate content issues. This can confuse search engines and dilute your ranking power. Make sure each page targets a unique keyword to avoid this problem.
Domain Authority
Your domain authority can take a hit if your site has too much duplicate content. Search engines prioritize unique, valuable content, so make sure every page on your site offers something new and useful. This will not only improve your crawl rate but also boost your overall domain authority.
Keep less pages with strong content. Wherever possible, keep some content on the page that changes regularly.
6. Reduce Your Site Loading Time
Website speed is an important factor. Google recommends that all websites should load in less than 2 seconds. In this case, make sure all images are optimized, don’t load unnecessary resources, set a cache in your .htaccess, enable persistent TCP connections, add gzip to your resources, and combine all of your CSS files into one and minify them, same with your JS files.
The good news: there are a handful of relatively easy steps you can take to improve site speed. These include:
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to assess current page loading times
Compress your images and other multimedia content to the lowest size possible without sacrificing clarity
Improve server response times by choosing high-quality servers
Perform JavaScript and CSS optimizations (by minimizing them)
The key is to keep your website lightweight by optimizing images for image SEO, leveraging browser caching, minifying code, and removing any unnecessary plugins or bloated elements that bog it down. Even a 1-second delay in load times can significantly impact bounce rates and conversions.
Mind your page load time. Note that the crawl works on a budget– if it spends too much time crawling your huge images or PDFs, there will be no time left to visit your other pages.
7. Block Access to Unwanted Pages via Robots.txt
Alright, let’s talk about blocking access to unwanted pages using the robots.txt file. This is super important because there’s no point in letting search engine bots crawl useless pages like admin pages or back-end folders. We don’t index them in Google, so why let them crawl such parts of the site?
Why Block Unwanted Pages?
Blocking unwanted pages helps in focusing the crawl budget on the important parts of your site. This means Google spends more time on the pages that matter, improving your overall SEO.
How to Edit Robots.txt
Simple editing on the robots.txt file will help you stop bots from crawling unnecessary parts of your site. Here’s a basic example:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /backend/
Blocking Specific Files
You can also block specific file types, such as PDF files, using robots.txt. For example:
Disallow: /*.pdf$
Pro Tip: You can block all pages in a folder or a single page so they will not be found in Google. This can be set up in the Admin Control Panel -> Website Settings -> SEO -> Robots.txt.
Common Issues
Two common technical issues beginners face are:
Being blocked by the robots.txt file.
Having “noindex” or “nofollow” directives implemented incorrectly.
Make sure to double-check your settings to avoid these pitfalls.
Additional Options
One option is the robots meta tag, which you can add to the head of any webpage you want to prevent Google from indexing. This gives you more control over individual pages without editing the robots.txt file.
8. Monitor and Optimize Google Crawl Rate
Monitoring and optimizing your Google crawl rate is crucial for ensuring that your website is indexed efficiently. You can do this using Google Search Console. Just head over to the crawl stats section and analyze the data. If you notice any issues, you can manually adjust the crawl rate settings. Use this feature with caution and only if you’re facing issues with bots not crawling your site effectively.
Steps to Adjust Crawl Rate
On the Search Console Home page, click the site that you want.
Click the gear icon, then click Site Settings.
In the Crawl rate section, select the option you want and then limit the crawl rate as desired.
The new crawl rate will be valid for 90 days.
Why It’s Important
Optimizing your crawl rate can help increase organic traffic and ensure that your most important pages are indexed more frequently. This can be particularly useful if you’re using website conversion tools or trying to boost blog traffic using Semrush.
Regularly monitoring your crawl stats can help you identify and fix issues before they impact your site’s performance.
9. Don’t Forget to Optimize Images
Optimizing images is a crucial step in improving your website’s crawl rate. Crawlers can’t read images directly, so it’s essential to use alt tags to provide descriptions that search engines can index. Images are included in search results only if they are properly optimized.
Resize and Compress Images
To optimize images for load speed, resize them and use proper image formatting. Smaller image sizes prompt faster loading times, which can significantly enhance your site’s performance.
Use Descriptive File Names
Give each image a meaningful name before you upload it to your website. Instead of uploading a photo as “IMG2837.jpg,” use a descriptive name like “bobby-roberts-sliding-home.jpg.” This helps search engines understand the content of the image.
Add Appropriate Metadata
Don’t forget to add metadata to your images. This includes alt tags, titles, and descriptions. These elements help search engines index your images more effectively.
Submit an Image Sitemap
Submitting an image sitemap to Google can also help improve your site’s crawl rate. This ensures that all your images are indexed and appear in search results.
Continuously monitor and optimize images by compressing file sizes and using next-gen formats. Use browser caching so returning visitors don’t have to re-download the same files. Minimize the use of third-party scripts, plugins, and embedded objects that can add excess bloat.
Remember, optimizing images is not just about SEO; it also improves user experience by making your site faster and more efficient. So, don’t overlook this important step!
Conclusion
So there you have it, folks! By following these 9 solid tips, you can significantly boost your website’s crawl rate and ensure that your important pages get indexed by Google. Remember, the key is to keep your content fresh, optimize your site structure, and make it as easy as possible for bots to navigate. Don’t forget to monitor your site’s performance and make adjustments as needed. Happy optimizing!
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Google crawl rate important for my website?
Google crawl rate is crucial because it determines how frequently Google bots visit your site to index new or updated content. A higher crawl rate can lead to faster indexing, which can improve your site’s visibility in search engine results.
How can interlinking blog pages improve crawl rate?
Interlinking blog pages helps Google bots navigate your site more efficiently. It ensures that all your pages are accessible and can be indexed, thereby improving your site’s overall crawl rate.
What role does server uptime play in Google crawl rate?
Server uptime is critical because if your server is frequently down, Google bots won’t be able to access your site. Consistent uptime ensures that bots can crawl your site without interruptions, improving your crawl rate.
Why should I avoid duplicate content?
Duplicate content can confuse search engines and waste crawl budget, which could be better spent indexing unique content. Avoiding duplicate content ensures that Google bots focus on indexing original and valuable content on your site.
How does reducing site loading time affect crawl rate?
A faster loading site provides a better user experience and allows Google bots to crawl more pages in less time. This can positively impact your crawl rate and overall SEO performance.
What is the purpose of a robots.txt file?
A robots.txt file is used to manage and restrict the pages that search engine bots can crawl. By blocking unwanted pages, you can ensure that Google bots focus on crawling and indexing the most important parts of your site.
