How to Improve Your Blog’s Crawling and Indexing Frequency

In reality, we think SEO is really easy, especially for the blogs. Writing up the contents, sharing all over, getting some backlinks and we are done, right?

Yeah that’s true, but unfortunately I have to say we are missing the great part behind it. No doubt the process we discussed might be able to get higher rankings. But what if search engines couldn’t properly crawl and index the pages? All your on page efforts will be wasted.

It’s really good to work very hard for on page and off page elements, but we have to be careful either the search engines can easily go through the site or not.

The good news is, if we can help search engine crawlers to crawl easily, they might reward us with higher rankings. The more crawling and indexing frequency means the more authority and ranking. So we need to know how we can help in their process.

What is Search Engine Crawling?

SE crawling is the process of going through a website and collecting possible data by the crawler bots. After collecting data, they report them to the indexing department of search engines.

Actually the crawlers can go through only links. They will not automatically find and analyze the websites. You have to make resources for them.

Either they will follow a link or not totally depends on the dofollow or nofollow attributes of web links. Dofollow declares to follow the link, contrary nofollow declares not to follow the link.

What is Search Engine Indexing?

Indexing is the process where the search engines will analyze the gathered data by crawler bots and index them on their search database depending upon the quality.

First of all they trim all the page excepting texts. They process the words and find out most appropriate keywords from it. Then they give it a rank determining the content quality.

The indexing process can be stopped by declaring a meta robots tag with noindex value. Noindex means do not index the page on search directory.

5 Tips to Improve Your Blog’s Crawling and Indexing Frequency

Image Courtesy: http://www.c4learn.com/

#1 Create sitemap.xml and Submit to Webmaster Tools

Sitemap.xml is a simple xml document that contains all the website links and hosted on the same website. The document sets priorities for the links based on the values and defines when the bots should re-crawl it. So usually the homepage gets highest priority and the posts get the lowest.

Actually, it’s tough and lengthy for crawler bots to find each link and index them. So if we list all the links on a single page and tell them to crawl from here, the process will be quite easier and faster.

So you should now create the file. You might probably ask how to create it? Here is what Google guides to create sitemap manually: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en.

Or you can use an online generator. Just head over to XML Sitemaps, enter your blog url, submit and download the file. Now upload it to your site’s root directory and that’s it.

Have you done it? Now we have to tell the se crawlers that we have got our sitemap. Logon to the webmaster tools such Google Webmasters, Bing Webmaster and submit your sitemap url. After that, the crawlers will start following the sitemap.

#2 Create robots.txt

Robots.txt doesn’t directly help in indexing but there are still some advantages. It’s a file that instructs the crawler which page to crawl and index which page not to.

Sometimes the bots feel a bit confused whether to go through or not. In that case, if there was a clear statement, there won’t be no more confusion. So it is recommended to create a robots.txt file and declare what to index.

Need help with formatting the txt file? You might check this guide on How to create a robots.txt file. If you are on WordPress, you can also use this plugin.

#3 Share Your New URLs on Social Media

Want to keep the crawlers busy with your blog? You should probably share your newly created urls on social media platforms like on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

But why? On a Moz case study, it has been proved that tweets increase the indexation rate. In fact, I personally experienced, posts that have been shared on social media got indexed faster than the posts that have not yet.

So after you publish contents with new urls, take a few minutes to share it on your social profiles and see the magic.

#4 Use Fetch Features from Webmaster Tools

The webmaster tools by search engines are made to keep up the correlation with the webmasters. They have made such useful tools for the users. One of them is the fetch tool.

Let me explain how it works. Search engine like Google, Bing has provided a tool to view a page just like a crawler do and submit it for indexation. In this way, a web page can be indexed within 2-24 hours depending on the queries.

Whenever you feel a page is not indexed or indexing very late, you can use this tool for instant indexation. But be cautious that it’s not recommended to index all your web pages. Just let the bots do their work for normal and safe indexing.

#5 If Necessary, Ping New URLs

Ping is a XML-RPC based service that nudges the search engines that a url has been updated. So the crawler can get back to it quickly. In this way, an updated page can be notified to search engines instantly.

If you want to ping a URL, you can use PingOMatic. Although there are thousands of tools available online for pinging URLs. You can use any of them.

But be cautious. Forcing the bots to crawl again and again would be a very bad practice. Doing it every time might hurt your indexation. So I will suggest you to use it only when there is no other way.

Conclusion

Crawling and indexing are two important factor your blog. As you care other things, you should add these to your caring list.

I personally believe this will help our seo. Because we are helping crawlers to do their work, so they might help us by ensuring better ranking.

What do you think about it? I will be waiting for your own thoughts about it…!!!

About The Author: Abrar Mohi is a young entrepreneur who is the man behind the blog BloggingSpell (www.bloggingspell.com). He is a web developer, internet marketer and as well as a passionate blogger. Besides his online presence, he is a fun loving person with immense interest of playing games and doing gyms. Interested to know more about him?