Googlebot’s Explained
Googlebot is the generic name for a special type of software that’s designed to crawl its way through the pages of public websites. Also known as the Google web crawler or search engine spider, Googlebot constantly scans documents from the World Wide Web and makes them available for Google’s Index and Google Search.
Google also has mobile and desktop crawlers, as well as specialised crawlers for news, images and video. So, let’s find out more about how the Google Crawler works and what you can do to get your pages indexed.
What do Googlebot’s Look For?
Google’s job is to deliver the very best content possible to the end user. The search engine must therefore know and understand site updates as well as new content added to the web. Only then can it provide the very latest information and be constantly up-to-date. With this in mind, Google uses a ton of computers to send out crawlers. These crawl every nook and cranny of the web to find content that needs to be indexed. All indexed pages can then be presented during a Google Search as they’ve been sorted, understood by the bots and categorised accordingly.
Google web crawlers find new content and pages through links on pages that are already known to them. If a bot is crawling a site that links to another site, the bot will follow the link, discover the new page and add it to Google’s ever-growing index. If discovered links have changed or are broken, this information will also be updated. So essentially, Google is like a library that never stops growing. But bots are needed in order to ensure that new content is found, stored and acknowledged.
While the process is extremely advanced and complicated, the most important thing to note is that the search engine giant uses algorithms that can identify the most effective and fastest way for Googlebot to search the entire network. There are also many different bot strategies depending on the content being crawled.
How Often do Googlebots Crawl?
Googlebot is constantly looking for new and updated content; however, the time for a new page to be indexed can vary. Typically, Google will index a new website in about four days to four weeks, but this depends on several factors. If you link to a new page from an authoritative page, for example, the bots will find your new content quicker as they hop from link to link. You can also submit an updated sitemap to Google Search Console if many changes have been made. Another thing you can do is to check that you’ve turned off ‘noindex’ commands which prevent pages from being crawled and indexed. The Google Search Console makes it easy to check when Googlebot last crawled your website and will help you to spot any indexing concerns.
Again, Google has a very complex system for determining when it crawls your site as well as the optimal crawl speed for a site. The overall goal is to crawl as many pages from your site as possible on each visit, without overwhelming your server’s bandwidth. If Google is making too many requests per second to your site and slowing down your server, it is possible to limit how fast the Google crawl happens.
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