In the earlier post in this series, we had published the various popular types and levels of web crawlers followed by reasons why your blog or website is not being as popular as you expected it to be in the first place. Since we had readers really reach out to know more about why do their websites not come up as search results, this is a continuation to the earlier post in the series
In case you missed reading part 1, you can click here to read it first.
Server Error
Are you seeing ‘five hundred something’ errors too often? This could be a strong symptom for major server problems. While this is quite annoying to your website users, it is also quite a put-off to search engine web crawlers as well. The simplest way to fix this problem is to reach out to your web developer with a set of links which display such an error to let him or her deal with the bugs or setting issues causing such an error.
This small fix can go a long way in reviving the search engine crawl on your website.
Save your budget
If there is a possibility of your website or blog containing pages that can be accessed only with qualified credentials, like those of subscribers, it is strongly advisable to make good use of meta tags like ‘nofollow’ or the robots.txt file which lets the bot completely circumvent these entire set of pages.
A web crawling process comes along with a cost and the cost would inflate significantly with typically no returns on investment if the search engine web crawling bot keeps requesting information with no success, repetetively. You can imagine this scenario as paying a kid to keep ringing a doorbell of a house till someone comes out when, in fact, there is nobody at the home – the kid will keep ringing the bell and you would be payoing for practically nothing.
Challenges with the server’s capacity
A server with a choked bandwidth may not just respond slowly to users but may also lead to absolute stoppage of responses to users and bot requests alike. In such a case, a typical error message would be that of a connection time-out. The solution to this problem lies in seeking adequate professional counsel. Only a professional website maintenance specialist will be able to run a few tests and analytics on the current server setup and recommend if an upgrade is required or if there’s something else causing the malfunction.
Bad configuration
This is typically an issue when the web server uses a particular configuration along with application firewalls like mod security which inherently, as a default configuration, blocks search engine web crawling bots.
In such a case, the website might be perfect for human interaction but keeps rejecting web crawler requests at the back. This can be solved by a server specialist.
These are typically the reasons why search engine web crawlers do not crawl your websites or blogs. While it is always advisable to seek specialist counsel to increase and sustain traffic on your website or blog, the above guidelines would at least hlp you take baby steps towards being successfully crawled by search engines’ web crawling bots.
In case you missed the previous list, you can click here to read ‘Why search engines are not web crawling your website/blog? Part 1'.