What Is Crawlability?
Crawlability is how easily search engines like Google can move through your website and read your pages. If your site is easy to crawl, search bots can find your content and understand it.
Definition
Crawlability is the ability of a website to let search engine bots access, follow, and read its pages without problems. Good crawlability means bots can visit links, see content, and reach important pages.
Why Crawlability Matters
Crawlability matters because search engines cannot rank what they cannot reach. When your site is crawlable:
- More of your pages can appear in search results
- New content can be found and updated faster
- Search engines can better understand your site structure and topics
- You avoid wasting crawl budget on broken or low value pages
How Crawlability Works
Search engines use bots, also called crawlers or spiders, to visit your site. These bots:
- Start on a page, often your homepage or sitemap
- Follow links to other pages on your site
- Read the content and code of each page
- Check files like robots.txt to see what is allowed or blocked
- Send what they find back to the search engine to be stored and used for rankings
If your links are broken, blocked, or hard to follow, crawlability becomes poor and some pages may never be seen.
Crawlability vs Indexability
Crawlability and indexability are related but different:
- Crawlability asks, Can bots reach and read this page
- Indexability asks, Is this page allowed to be stored and shown in search results
A page can be crawlable but not indexable, for example if it has a noindex tag. For strong SEO you want both good crawlability and good indexability.
Example of Crawlability
Imagine a blog with 100 articles. The site uses clear internal links, a simple menu, and has an XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console. The robots.txt file does not block important pages. Search bots can easily move from the homepage to each article, read the text, and send it to Google. This blog has good crawlability.
FAQs
How can I improve crawlability
- Use clear internal links between related pages
- Fix broken links and redirect old URLs correctly
- Create and submit an XML sitemap
- Avoid blocking important pages in robots.txt
- Make your site fast and mobile friendly
How do I know if my site has crawl issues
Use tools like Google Search Console. Check the Pages or Crawl reports for errors such as blocked pages, server errors, and not found pages. You can also use crawling tools to scan your site.
Is crawlability the same as crawl budget
No. Crawlability is about how easy your site is to crawl. Crawl budget is how many pages a search engine chooses to crawl on your site in a given time. Better crawlability helps use your crawl budget wisely.
