If reading this, you probably already know that Google crawls the web to find new pages. It then indexes these pages to understand what they are about and ranks them according to the retrieved data. Crawling and indexing are two different processes but they are both performed by a crawler.
In our new guide on how does Google crawling work, we will help uncover some of the things you probably didn’t know. Read on to see what Google crawler is, how it works, and how you can make its interaction with your website more successful so that crawling issues will never be the reason your rankings dropped.
What is Google Crawler?
Google crawler is a piece of software Google and other search engines use to scan the web. You can put it that it crawls the web from page to page, trying to find new or updated content Google doesn’t have in its databases yet.
It is worth mentioning that any search engine has its own set of crawlers. As for Google, there are more than 15 different types of crawlers, and the main Google crawler is called Googlebot, which performs both crawling and indexing. That’s why we will delve deeper into how it works.
How Does Google Crawler Work?
You might not know this, but Google has no central registry of URLs, which is updated whenever a new page is created. What this simply means is that Google isn’t ‘alerted’ about new pages automatically, but has to find them on the web. Googlebot constantly wanders through the internet and searches for new pages, adding them to Google’s database of existing pages.
The very moment Googlebot discovers a new page, it renders the page in a browser, loading all the HTM, third-party code, JavaScript, and CSS. This information is then stored in the search engine’s database and then used to index and rank the page.
It is worth mentioning that the Google crawler renders a page in the latest version of Chromium browser. In the perfect case scenario, Google crawler ‘sees’ a page the way you designed and assembled it.
The division is needed to index pages for both desktop and mobile SERPs. A couple of years ago, Google used a desktop crawler to visit and render most of the pages. But things have changed with the mobile-first concept introduction.
