How to Speed Up Website Crawling and Indexing by Search Engines?

To start with, let's figure out what crawling and indexing of a website by search engines actually are, as these are two important SEO stages performed by search bots (such as Googlebot, Bingbot or others) to include your site's content in their databases. They are two interconnected but different processes.

Site crawling is the process during which search bots navigate to your website, reviewing every page and collecting information about its content, URL links and other important attributes. During crawling, bots determine which pages on your site are worth indexing and which are of low quality or whose crawling or indexing is forbidden by the site owner. Sometimes you may come across the term "crawling" - know that it is the same thing as scanning.

Site indexing is the process that takes place after crawling, when search bots save the collected information in their database, i.e. the index. This allows the search engine to efficiently search information on your site's pages in response to user queries and display your pages in search results.

You can allow or disallow crawling and/or indexing of certain pages. This can be done in several ways: in the robots.txt file, in HTTP headers of pages using the X-Robots-Tag header, or in the "robots" meta tag. Google also allows blocking part of a page's content from indexing using the HTML data-nosnippet attribute. More detailed information about managing crawling and indexing can be found in the search engines' documentation.

How to Speed Up Crawling of a New Site?

New or "young", as they say in SEO slang, sites need to work hard to make it onto the search bots' checklist. To make robots come to the site faster, you need to send them signals - these can be links to your site on social media, mentions in popular media and links on other websites that are already actively crawled by search engines.

You need to build smart internal linking, that is, links between your pages, because this is one of the main arguments by which the importance of pages and their static weight is determined. Also, when crawling, the bot collects all URL links found on pages in order to visit them as well and "read" their content. So you have to connect pages between each other into logical relationships, adding links from some pages to others. It's worth remembering that the bot won't be able to find pages without internal links if you don't pass them by other methods, but even if the bot learns about such pages, the chance of them getting into the index is very low, since their internal weight is close to zero.

Take care of page load speed optimization, as it directly affects crawling speed. Optimize images, minify CSS and JavaScript files and use caching to speed up your site's loading.

If you have a large site, take care of having an XML sitemap, i.e. a list of page URLs you want to inform search engines about. This will allow them to find new pages of your site faster than by crawling for internal links.

Another, and the fastest, way to ensure crawling of a website by search bots is using a special search engine API that allows you to notify about new site pages or new content via special signals through a site-to-search-engine interaction protocol. In Google this protocol is called the Web Search Indexing API, in Bing the analogue is IndexNow. You can also do this manually via the Google Search Console and Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools webmaster panels. The essence of how such systems work - you have to send URLs that need to be crawled and indexed to a special server that accepts your requests and forwards them to the queue for search bots.

How to Speed Up Site Indexing?

The most important thing to remember - create quality unique and useful content, and the result will not be long in coming. Publishing regular, interesting and valuable content will encourage search engines to index your site more often. But besides this you can help bots detect changes on your site using the aforementioned Indexing API and IndexNow protocols. We have developed special extensions - modules that allow this in online stores built on the OpenCart CMS.

Distribute your content through social networks. This will allow search engines to discover your pages faster via social activity signals.

Get external links from authoritative sites in your niche. This will contribute to faster indexing of your content, since search engines visit your site more often through these links. But do not abuse this method - links to your site should be organic and relevant to your topic.

Content authorship also plays an important role for indexing. If your articles list an authoritative author, your content is often cited, linked or retweeted in other media or social networks, this can boost your site's authority in the eyes of search engines. The importance of content authorship is also confirmed by such factors as author details, biographical data, links to other works by the author and so on. For example, in the case of news articles the name of a journalist or author is often listed, which can affect the perception of content as authoritative and significant for search engines. Authoritative and valuable content can positively influence the indexing of your pages by search engines.

Use our tips and information from search engines' documentation, and you will be able to help speed up the crawling and indexing of your site by search bots and improve its positions in search results.