Understanding crawling in SEO: a 10-point guide

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What is crawl throttling in SEO ?

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In the world of referencing natural, it is essential to adapt your strategies to ensure optimum visibility on search engines such as Google.

A concept that is often overlooked, but which is crucial in this context, is that of the Throttling crawl.

To give you a better understanding of this subject and its importance for your website, here is a 10-point guide to the basics.

1. Crawling, the foundation of search engine optimisation

The crawl is the process by which an algorithm crawls all the pages of a site, analysing its content to determine its relevance and positioning in the search results. Search engines like Google use robots called crawlers or indexing robots to carry out this task.

2. Crawl frequency, a key factor

La crawl frequency determines the number of times a robot visits your site over a given period. This value has a major impact on your ranking, since it influences the speed with which new features and changes to your site are taken into account by the search engines.

The higher your crawl frequency, the faster your content will be indexed, which will help to improve your natural referencing.

3. What is crawl throttling?

Le Throttling crawl can be defined as a limit imposed by search engines on the frequency and depth of crawling on a given site. This limit may be motivated by technical problems, algorithm optimisation or even to conserve server resources.

4. Why is this concept important in SEO?

A good understanding of crawling enables SEO experts to adapt their strategies, particularly in terms of management of crawl resourcesto optimise the indexing of their content and improve their positioning in search results.

Penalties for Throttling the Crawl

Poor management of the resources dedicated to crawling can lead to penalties that affect your natural referencing. If your site requires too many resources during the crawling process (high loading time, duplicated content, etc.), the robots may not crawl all the pages, or may even avoid your site altogether due to recurring blockages.

5. Factors influencing the Throttling crawl

Several factors can influence Throttling:

• The quality of the content : Sites offering quality content that meets users' expectations are generally favoured by search engines.
• Le budget crawl : Search engines can determine a "crawl budget", i.e. a maximum limit of resources allocated to the operation of a given website over a given period. This value generally depends on a site's reputation and number of pages.
• Technical optimisation : A site with optimised loading times, an internal networking well structured and good use of Meta tags will be easier for search engines to index.

6. How can I avoid Throttling?

To reduce the risk of undergoing a Throttling crawl, there are a number of factors to take into account to improve theuser experience and make it easier for search engines to access content. Here are a few tips:

• Optimising site performance: Take care to improve the loading speed of your pages, in particular by reducing the size of images, compressing files CSS and JavaScriptor by using a cache system.
• Structuring content correctly : Use Hn tags (H1, H2, H3...) to organise your headings and sub-headings into a hierarchy, which will give search engines a better understanding of the overall structure of your page.
• Promote good internal networking: By creating relevant internal links, you will help indexing robots to better understand the structure and overall content of your site.
• Use the protocol HTTPS : Ensuring a high level of security on your site is also beneficial for its natural referencing.

7. How to detect crawling?

To check whether your site is being crawled, you need to analyse the behaviour of the indexing robots using different tools:

1. Log files : These files keep track of the visits made by crawlers to your site, making it possible to analyse their frequency and path.
2. La Google Search Console : This tool provides various indicators relating to the crawling and indexing of your site, such as the errors encountered by the robots and the access statistics for the various pages.

8. Anticipating and preventing crawl problems

Being proactive in detecting and resolving technical problems can go a long way towards reducing the risk of crawling. It is advisable to regularly review the elements mentioned above (loading speed, internal meshing, Meta tags, etc.) to ensure that your site is running smoothly overall.

9. Crawl budget management

Adapting your crawl budget to the resources available and the architecture of your site allows you to optimise the frequency with which the indexing robots visit your site, and thus to encourage a better referencing natural.

• Target important pages: The most relevant or strategic elements of your site should be prioritised by means of internal links, Meta tags and consistent internal linking.
• Limit the number of pages : If possible, reduce the total number of pages if some of them are not essential for your users, which will improve management of the resources allocated to crawling.

10. Use an SEO agency

If you want to optimise your online visibility and better manage your crawl budget without taking risks, it is advisable to call on the services of a SEO agency. This team will be able to analyse in detail the problems linked to the crawling of your site and offer you appropriate solutions to improve your natural referencing in the best possible conditions.