For your website and web pages to appear in Google and other search results, the crawling bots must visit your site. If the crawled URLs meet SEO criteria, they will then be indexed by search engines.
What is the frequency of Googlebot visits ? How does Googlebot work? How do you request indexing bots to visit?
Here’s the procedure to speed up the crawl of your website!
How does Googlebot work?
Each search engine has its own crawling bot: Google: Googlebot, Bing: Bingbot, Qwant: Qwantify…
Googlebot is the generic name for a crawling software. It is also referred to as a User‑Agent, web crawler, or web spider. It operates the same way as all other bots, including malicious bots and spambots.
The Google bot explores a site page by page, link by link as a user would. The crawler collects site resources (web pages, PDF and Word documents, images, videos, HTML source code…) based on your crawl budget and then analyzes the relevance of the data.
If these are relevant, it then adds the URLs to theGoogle index. Your web pages then become part of Google’s vast index that contains hundreds of billions of web pages.
During indexing, information is organized by topic thanks to the semantic field of your content. You now understand the importance of your keyword choices for your organic SEO!
To return to our robot, you can alsoprevent from crawling certain pages of yours, such as product pages with similar content. This will save on your crawl budget. If you want to block a URL from the crawler, use a robots.txt file at the root of your server.
Specify the name of the robot to block or an asterisk if you want to block all crawlers (except the AdsBot, which must be specified explicitly), followed by the disallow entry:
- User-agent: robot name
- Disallow: URL to block
How often do Google's bots crawl?
Crawling an entire site can take time and, depending on the number of your URLs and your crawl budget, this can range from a few hours to a few days.
Also, to avoid slowing the server and causing an overload, the crawler will not visit all pages of the site at once, which further lengthens the indexing delay…
How can you increase Google's crawl frequency?
As you’ll have understood, the indexing of your site’s pages depends above all on Googlebot. Unfortunately, the frequency of its visits is very unpredictable. So, if you’ve just created new web pages and want them to be indexed quickly by the search engine, here are some tips to increase the frequency of Google’s crawlers!
Create new content
The crawler bot will visit sites that are regularly updated and that offer quality SEO content more frequently. So the best way to get your pages indexed quickly is to publish high-quality content as often as possible.
Also watch out for duplicate content on your site. If you don’t want to block access to similar content pages for Google’s bot because they’re important for your SEO, rewrite them to make them unique!
Edit your main pages
If your site contains thousands of URLs, your crawl budget limits the number of pages crawled. Bots will therefore prioritize your site’s main pages: your homepage, top-level category pages, pillar pages… If you want to attract the bot’s attention, update these authoritative pages regularly.
Earn quality backlinks
The last tip to increase Googlebot’s crawl frequency is to get as many external links as possible. Googlebot follows links from site to site, including outgoing links. Consequently, a site that includes a link to your site will prompt the bot to visit your site!
How to make Googlebot's crawl easier
The following recommendations will not increase the frequency of Googlebot visits. However, they will make crawling easier and therefore speed up the site’s indexing and its visibility in Google search.
Optimize your internal linking
To make it easier for the bot to navigate between your pages, optimize your internal links. Ideally, your strategic pages should be reachable in as few steps as possible with relevant link anchors. Analyze your site to check for orphan pages, because any pages not attached to the structure will not be crawled.
Optimize your URL
A well-crafted URL structure plays a crucial role in page indexing. The clearer and more explicit your URL, the easier it is for the bot to understand which category to place your site in. The best URLs are simple, short, and easy to read: domain name + main keyword. Remove any unnecessary filler words.
Improve your pages' load time
As we’ve seen, server response speed impacts your crawl budget and is one of Google’s SEO criteria. So by improving your pages’ loading speed, the crawler will crawl more pages!
Generate an XML sitemap file
Creating a sitemap file will simplify the crawling process and enable better indexing of your pages. A sitemap is a file that lists all the URLs you want crawled and thus indexed. The crawler can then see your site’s structure at a glance. Once your file is created, you just need to make it available to Google, either by adding it to your robots.txt file or by submitting it in Search Console.
How to submit an indexing request to Google?
If you’ve just published new content or modified existing content, you can ask Google to come index or reindex your URLs.
If you don't have many URLs to index:
Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console (accessible from the left-hand sidebar).
- Insert your link into the inspection bar.
- Then on the page that appears, click 'Request indexing'.
If you have many URLs to index at the same time, submit a sitemap to Google.
However, don't expect an immediate effect; you'll still have to wait a few days.
Our tip to increase Googlebot's crawl frequency
Do you want to increase the frequency of Googlebot visits quickly? The fastest and most effective way to get every page of a site indexed very quickly and to rank on Google's first page is to create content!
Do you need product sheets, blog posts, or quality web page content? Then order your texts quickly on Redacteur.com !
