Crawlability and indexing tips to optimize your SEO

A solid SEO strategy relies on search engines crawling your website and indexing your pages in their databases so they appear in the results pages.

What is crawlability?

When users type questions into a search engine, bots scan indexes of billions of pages to find what is most relevant. Pages reach those indexes through crawling: bots follow links from site to site, read your content and code, assess their quality and intent, and add them to their indexes.

Why a page might not be indexed

There are several reasons: 'noindex' meta tags, robots.txt rules, duplicate content, pages not crawled yet, crawl errors or 404 errors.

Indexing in SEO

Indexing happens after crawling. Search engines organize their findings into vast indexes and rank sites by relevance to queries. They must index your pages before they have a chance to rank.