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How to manage the depth of SEO side crawling

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We often talk about crawlability, crawl budgets and the like, but how to manage the depth of the SEO side crawling?
In this article:
1.       Search engine scanning: what it is and how it works
2.       Bots and the User Agent
3.       Images and text: the scan
4.       The URL scan
5.       The sitemaps

Perhaps those just listed are all topics not suitable for the inexperienced and those who have just started a website. However, they represent essential elements for SEO experts and in general for all professionals in the sector. Understanding how the search engine works, what processes are activated and the affected crawlers is essential! In fact, it allows you to deepen how Google works, what expectations it has towards the portals it hosts and is closely linked to the general well-being of our site.

Search engine scanning: what it is and how it works

When we talk about crawling we mean the process that search engine web crawlers use to visit a page and download its contents. In this phase, the links present are taken into consideration to go even deeper into the site and discover other linked pages.

 Google, Bing, and all the other search engines are used to start scanning the pages already known cyclically. In this way, the search engine will be able to find out immediately if changes have been made compared to the previous scan. If the answer is positive, the search engine will update the index based on the changes found in the content.

Web crawlers are therefore all those functions that search engines use to analyze sites and to access online content. The scan is started thanks to the download of the robots.txt file, which contains the rules dedicated to bots or spiders. For example, you can specify which pages to exclude from the index (noindex) and also accept the scan (index) of a specific subfolder. The file usually also mentions the path where the sitemap is present, that is, the collection of all the URLs of the site. Crawlers use a series of algorithms which, combined with precise rules, determine how often a page should be crawled. The analysis also establishes how many and which pages of a site should be indexed. Based on what we've just seen,

Bots and the User Agent

Search engines scan a portal or website thanks to bots. Their identity is linked to the User Agent, that is, to the string of the user agent that provides information on the online pages to the server.

Some of the most popular bots:

·         Googlebot User Agent
·         Bingbot User Agent
·         Baidu User Agent
·         Yandex User Agent
Mozilla / 5.0 (compatible; Googlebot / 2.1; +
http://www.google.com/bot.html
)
Mozilla / 5.0 (compatible; bingbot / 2.0; +
http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm
)
Mozilla / 5.0 (compatible; bingbot / 2.0; +
http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm
)
Mozilla / 5.0 (compatible; YandexBot / 3.0; +
http://yandex.com/bots
)
Mediapartners-Google
Googlebot-News
Googlebot-Image / 1.0

As Google points out in its official user-agent and crawler guide , the strings can be verified thanks to a reverse DNS lookup. The process is also known as the reverse DNS lookups and is useful for confirming that the requesting IP address corresponds to the search engine.
Images and text: the scan

Knowing how to manage the depth of SEO side crawling will also be useful to give the 'right weight' to multimedia content. In the event that the search engine encounters a URL linked to an image, an audio or a video, it will not be possible to read the contents of the file in a canonical way. Instead, he will have to use the metadata and the file name.

It should be emphasized that a search engine can only capture a certain amount of information about non-textual files. This however does not prevent their indexing or positioning. For example, useful traffic can also be obtained thanks to multimedia content.

URL crawling

Crawlers are able to find out if there are new pages on a site thanks to the famous links. The links are like a bridge that connects different types of content and therefore unique URLs. When the search engine crawls already known pages, it will queue the analysis of the associated URLs. This is also why it is increasingly important to create functional text anchors not only for the user, but also by virtue of the architecture and hierarchy of our site.

Sitemaps

As we have seen in the previous paragraphs, in the robots.txt file it is possible to specify the sitemap (or more) related to the site. It is a list of pages and posts that are crawled. For the search engine it will become a valuable tool to find even those contents not visible on the surface, but hidden in the depth of the portal. 

Read Also: Digital Marketing Services

At the same time, SEOs will be able to understand precisely thanks to the sitemap how to manage the depth of crawling. The extracted data will even reveal how often the search engine usually crawls and indexes pages.

Read Also: SEO NYC Company

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