Understanding crawlability and indexability is key to ensuring that your beautifully designed website is discoverable and drives the levels of traffic you want to achieve.
What is crawlability?
Crawlability is a term that refers to how successfully and easily search engine bots can navigate each page on your website. Search engine bots are often referred to as spiders and their job is to follow links to access and understand the content on each webpage.
If your website isn’t crawlable, search engines won’t be able to evaluate your site’s content, and you won’t secure prominent ranking positions in important search engine results pages.
What is indexability?
Indexability is a term that refers to the process search engines follow in order to access, analyse and store webpages, which is required for all pages that are displayed in SERPs. Each webpage needs to meet a particular selection of criteria in order to be fully indexed, so it’s worth understanding what these criteria are and how to meet them.
Common issues
Searching for something like ‘SEO agency near me’ will provide you with a selection of knowledgeable optimisation teams such as https://www.nettl.com/uk/seo-agency-near-me/, with the skills to help you to boost your position in SERPs. But let’s briefly consider two common indexing and crawling issues.
Thin content
If your content isn’t unique or doesn’t include much detail, search engines may decide that it’s not valuable and therefore won’t index it.
Crawl errors
Crawl errors can occur for a number of reasons, including slow server response times and 404 errors.
