In the information age today, where information on almost any topic is available through shared forums, blogs and web pages across the internet, every contributor wishes to be heard, seen and followed. However, the journey to digital fame begin with a small stage – recognition. For being an internet sensation and having your content viral, or at least known over the internet, it is very essential for your content to first appear as a search result. Think about it. What content would you follow if you were researching on a particular topic? Obviously, the one that first pops on your search result screen. That’s exactly where every content creator aspires to be – at the top of every search engine result. This aspiration is majorly for featuring on google’s top search results list owing to its massive popularity and market share as a search engine.
While you may only be aware of the fact that using relevant keywords would bump you up to the list; but that may not be all that there’s to it. Googlebot – google’s web crawling bot is going to be your friend in your journey from one-in-a-million (literally!) web page to top search result. Googlebot is responsible to crawl your website and add it to the google index.
Now, the bigger question is – how would you ensure that Googlebot crawls your page at the earliest?
What is Googlebot? What is the difference between crawling and indexing?
Before we delve into the details, it is essential to understand what googlebot is all about. Simply put, googlebot is google’s web crawling bot that google sends out to fetch, structure and articulate data related to search points and add them to google’s searchable index.
Now, crawling is the functional process wherein the Googlebot visits multiple web-pages to fetch new and updated data points which is consequently updated to google’s index. Googlebot begins with searching for a webpage with content related to relevant keywords and then uses this as a anchor page to keep finding and fetching related links across the web page.
Indexing is an extension of the web crawling process. Indexing refers to the process wherein all the relevant information fetched through googlebot’s web crawling activity is processed in a structured manner. Once these data files are processed, they are included in google’s discoverable index subject to the fact that they are determined to be of superior quality. The indexing process involves Googlebot to process every attribute, word and phrase from the web page to complete the indexing process.
Now, the next question would be – how does Googlebot succeed in finding fresh content over the world wide web which includes multiple trillion web pages which further include several types and forms of blogs, forums and similar? Well, the Googlebot simply browses the previous web pages crawled. Once this is done, it tries to identify links within the content of these web pages to add to the list of web pages that are to be called.
So, fresh and updated content on the world wide web is found through links placed in the sitemap.