Glossary · technical-seo
What is Crawling?
Crawling is a search engine's bot fetching your pages by following links — the same way a person clicks around a site, but automated and far faster. Googlebot arrives, downloads the HTML, notes every link it finds, and queues those for later. How often it comes back depends on how often you change things and how quickly your server answers. If the bot cannot reach a page because the server was down, a login blocks it, robots.txt forbids it, or no link anywhere points to it, that page never enters the system at all.
What does Crawling mean for a business in Pakistan?
Server reliability matters more here than most people expect. Cheap local hosting that drops out during load-shedding or peak evening traffic means the bot sometimes arrives to a timeout, and Google slows its crawl rate when a site is repeatedly slow. If a page takes eight seconds to answer on a mobile connection at 9pm, that is a crawl problem before it is a user problem.
A worked example
A 5,000-page site answering in 3 seconds gets far fewer daily fetches than the same site answering in 300 milliseconds, because Google backs off when a server strains. At 400 fetches a day the slow version needs almost 13 days to see every page; at 2,000 a day the fast one clears it in under three. New pages then appear in hours rather than a fortnight.
Terms that go with this one
These come up in the same conversations and are worth reading together.
- IndexingindexingIndexing is Google storing a copy of your page so it can be shown in results. It is the step after crawling: a bot visits the page, then Google…
- SitemapsitemapA sitemap is an XML file listing the URLs on your site that you want search engines to know about, usually sitting at /sitemap.xml. It is a…
- SEOSEOSEO is the work of making a website turn up in Google's unpaid results when someone searches for what you sell. It has three parts: technical work so…
- llms.txtllms dot txtllms.txt is a plain text file placed at the root of a website — yoursite.com/llms.txt — offering language models a short, curated map of the site in…
- Schema markupschema markupSchema markup is structured data added to a page in a fixed vocabulary, so machines can read facts instead of guessing at sentences. Usually written…
Crawling — quick answers
What does Crawling mean?
Crawling is a search engine's bot fetching your pages by following links — the same way a person clicks around a site, but automated and far faster. Googlebot arrives, downloads the HTML, notes every link it finds, and queues those for later.
Crawling ko Urdu mein kya kehte hain?
کرالنگ — though in practice almost everyone in Pakistan says "crawling". Server reliability matters more here than most people expect.
Why does Crawling matter for a business in Pakistan?
Server reliability matters more here than most people expect. Cheap local hosting that drops out during load-shedding or peak evening traffic means the bot sometimes arrives to a timeout, and Google slows its crawl rate when a site is repeatedly slow. If a page takes eight seconds to answer on a mobile connection at 9pm, that is a crawl problem before it is a user problem.
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