Crawlability means that the search engine can access and navigate the pages and resources of the website. If a page on the web is not crawlable, then search engines wouldn’t be able to analyze its content. Thus, it might harm search rankings.
Crawlability differs from indexability.
Whether or not a page is accessible is determined by crawlability. Indexability determines if it can be added to the search engine’s index.
Why is Crawlability Important?
Your website needs to be crawlable for organic search visibility. To be listed and shown in search results, pages must be crawled by search engines. Sometimes Google can index a URL without actually crawling it. Typically, this happens through the use of anchor text and URL references.
Factors Affecting Crawlability.
- To ensure search engines can find pages, they must not only be placed in the sitemap of the website but they should also be linked internally.
- Links with the “rel=nofollow” attribute prevent search engines from following them, this potentially limits crawlability for the web pages.
- A robots.txt file could limit access to a specific page thus lowering crawlability.
- Robot.txt files can stop crawlers from seeing your websites.
- You can identify crawlability problems with SEO tools like Site Audit or Webmaster Tools. It gives search engines access to crawl and index your site.
