The inner workings of web crawling: a fascinating discovery

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What is web crawling in SEO?

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In today's digital world, data is everywhere and accessible with just a few clicks.

To be effective on the Internet, particularly for search engine optimisation (SEO), it is essential to understand what the Web Crawling. This method is used to collect and analyse data from web pages.

This article takes a closer look at this SEO practice.

Web crawling: definition

Le Web Crawlingor web crawling, is an automated process whereby robots called crawlers retrieve information from web pages. The main aim is to index these web pages in order to improve the relevance and accuracy of search engines such as Google. Beyond search engines, web crawling can also be used for a variety of applications ranging from marketing to competitive analysis.

How does a crawler work?

A crawlerA spider, also known as a spider or robot, is a computer programme developed to automatically browse websites and collect specific information. It uses algorithms to identify hypertext links leading from its source page to other pages. By following these links, it is able to move methodically through the different levels of the site to retrieve the information requested.

Web crawling in SEO: 10 key points

To fully understand the importance and applications of web crawling in natural search engine optimisation (SEO), here are ten points to give you an overview.

1. Indexing web pages

The main mission of the crawlers is to index web pages so that search engines can display results relevant to queries submitted by Internet users. This data is stored in a gigantic directory which the algorithms use to provide the appropriate results for each search.

2. Regular updates

To keep the database up to date, crawlers index new pages and update existing ones on websites. This allows search engines to suggest new information or content changes in their results.

3. Browse by page popularity

Crawlers generally access pages according to their popularity with Internet users. A page with a large number of visitors or incoming links is more likely to be crawled frequently than one with fewer visitors.

4. Compliance with the rules set by the site owners

A site owner can tell crawlers how to explore his web space by setting certain authorisations or prohibitions. The robots.txt is the main method used to communicate these rules to crawlers.

5. Technical limitations

Crawlers can sometimes have difficulty interpreting certain content on a page, particularly multimedia elements such as Flash or JavaScript. This is an important point when you want to optimise your site for effective natural referencing.

6. Web browsing speed

Robots move at different speeds depending on the site, and also on the technologies represented on each site. It is possible to speed up this process by facilitating their work via meta tags and clear links.

7. Language of content

A crawler can identify the language of a web page using certain tags HTML tags, such as the lang="" . This would enable it to better index the same page in the search results corresponding to the main language of the content in question.

8. Duplicate content

The crawlers ensure that the duplicate content (or duplicate content) present on several domains and reduce its indexing as much as possible. To avoid this, we recommend using canonical tags to specify which version of the pages should be considered as original and taken into account for indexing.

9. Website architecture

The architecture of a website has a direct impact on its SEO. Crawlers attach particular importance to the hierarchy of information and internal links to facilitate exploration.

10. Quality of content

Ultimately, search engines crawl web pages to extract only the best possible content, which is relevant and best responds to users' queries. A site with quality content is therefore favoured during the indexing process by the search engines, and hopes to achieve better natural referencing.