What is Google Crawling?

Google Crawling is the process during which Google's 'bots', often referred to as 'spiders' or 'crawlers', visit new and updated webpages to understand and index them. It is the first step in the process of Google understanding what your website is about and how it should present it to users in search results.

The crawlers scan websites and follow the links found on these websites to discover content that's new or updated. This information is then processed and stored in Google's index, ready to be served up in search results when relevant to a user's search query.

For optimal crawling, website owners should ensure their site is easily navigable, regularly updated, and that any changes or updates are immediately crawlable by Google's bots.

In digital marketing, Google Crawling is fundamental for improving your website’s visibility. By allowing Google's bots to crawl and index your website, you essentially ensure your website's existence on the World Wide Web.

Ensuring a website is correctly crawled and indexed by Google can increase its SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) ranking, leading to a boost in traffic, conversions, and ultimately revenue. Also, understanding the crawling process can help you troubleshoot SEO issues and refine your strategy.

From a marketing perspective, a well-crawled site means a better understanding of your site’s content by Google, which translates to more relevant traffic and higher conversions.

An example of Google Crawling would be when a website launches a new product page. The Google bots will crawl that page, examining its content, the text, images and any other relevant data. It will then add this new page to its index, ready to be displayed when relevant to users' search.

Another instance is when you update content or make changes to your site’s structure. Google's crawlers will revisit your site to re-crawl and re-index the updated content or pages.

Google also offers the ability to manually submit URLs for crawling via the Google Search Console. This is especially useful for making sure new or updated content is quickly indexed after significant site changes.