What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to help search engines find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. It helps increase visibility and rankings in search engines.
How complicated is technical SEO?
It depends. The fundamentals aren’t really difficult to master, but technical SEO can be complex and hard to understand. I’ll keep things as simple as I can with this guide.
How crawling works
Crawling is where search engines grab content from pages and use the links on them to find even more pages. There are a few ways you can control what gets crawled on your website. Here are a few options.
Robots.txt
A robots.txt file tells search engines where they can and can’t go on your site.
Crawl rate
There’s a crawl-delay directive you can use in robots.txt that many crawlers support. It lets you set how often they can crawl pages. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t respect this. For Google, you’ll need to change the crawl rate in Google Search Console.
Access restrictions
If you want the page to be accessible to some users but not search engines, then what you probably want is one of these three options:
- Some kind of login system
- HTTP authentication (where a password is required for access)
- IP whitelisting (which only allows specific IP addresses to access the pages)
This type of setup is best for things like internal networks, member-only content, or for staging, test, or development sites. It allows for a group of users to access the page, but search engines will not be able to access the page and will not index it.
How to see crawl activity
For Google specifically, the easiest way to see what it’s crawling is with the “Crawl stats” report in Google Search Console, which gives you more information about how it’s crawling your website.
If you want to see all crawl activity on your website, then you will need to access your server logs and possibly use a tool to better analyze the data. This can get fairly advanced. But if your hosting has a control panel like cPanel, you should have access to raw logs and some aggregators like AWstats and Webalizer.
Crawl adjustments
Each website is going to have a different crawl budget, which is a combination of how often Google wants to crawl a site and how much crawling your site allows. More popular pages and pages that change often will be crawled more often, and pages that don’t seem to be popular or well linked will be crawled less often.
If crawlers see signs of stress while crawling your website, they’ll typically slow down or even stop crawling until conditions improve.
After pages are crawled, they’re rendered and sent to the index. The index is the master list of pages that can be returned for search queries. Let’s talk about the index.
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