SEO 101 – Crawl & Ranking
Lets now talk about how search engine works. Google is a pattern detection program where when you search for a keyword phrase, Google will provide you with a list of websites that matches the pattern related to your search.
When you do search on Google, you are not searching the live web. You are searching for Google’s index of the web, a stored copy of the sites that Google has crawled.
The program Google uses to crawl the web called Spiders. It discovers content buy starting on a page and checkout all the content on that page, then follows the links and look at the contents on those pages to discover more contents and keep continue follows the link and discover more content until most of the internet been crawled, copied, and stored in on Google servers.
How Google rank the pages? It uses an algorithm to look at the list of pages it just pulled from index and rank the pages based on relevancy. Let’s use “Business Cards Printing” as an example – Google going to start search the index and come up with a list of every websites Google has crawled with a “Business Cards Printing”. Then it’s going to use the algorithm to sort the list so the most relevant sites will be at the top.
There are lots of factors that will decide the ranking of the result, such as content on the page, backlinks (number of other sites linking to the page), website health (no error links), and the overall quality of the site.
We have list below that can makes your website is not crawler friendly :
1. URL error / Broken Links : usually caused by a typo in the URL link you have inserted on your page (text link, image link, etc..)
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2. Outdated Sitemap : if you have updated your website and added new pages or product, it’s better to generate a new sitemap and update the new sitemap to Google Web Master Tools
please find the training link how you can generate a new site map : generate new sitemap >
3. Old URLs : if you have edit your content page or product page URL, make sure you re-direct the old URL to the new one so it will not end up to 404 error page.
please find the training link how you can re-direct old URL : re-direct old URL >
4. Content duplication : duplicate content is the most frequent issues on the website. The cause of having duplicate content, page title, or metatags can cause Google only dedicate a minimal time to crawl your site as it will sees it as the same content and making it hard for the spiders to know which content is correct and needs to be indexed or gives a priority.
please find the training link how you can optimise the metatags of your website here : Optimise metatags >
note: claim your first FREE SEO website audit here > audit my website or send an email to peeter@editandprint.com.au with your company name as the email subject – SEO Audit