One of the basic terms in SEO and which you must have read by now is Google Spider. But what exactly is this and how does it actually work? Let us break down for you the gist of Google site indexing.

What Is The Google Spider And What Does It Do For Your Site?

Google Spider is basically Google’s crawler. A crawler is a program/algorithm designed by search engines to crawl and track websites and web pages as a way of indexing the internet.

When Google visits your website for tracking/indexing purposes, this process is done by Google’s Spider crawler. Once the spider visits your web page, the results are potentially put onto Google’s index, or, as we know it, a search engine results page (SERP). The better and smoother the crawling process, potentially the higher your website will rank.

Crawling means following a path, and in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world, this means following the links that appear on your website. This is one reason why site maps are created; they can contain all of the links in a website being used by Google’s bots to look deeply into it.

Given that thousands of new web pages are developed and published every day with even more web pages being constantly updated and redesigned, the Google Spider goes through the web analyzing pages, code and links it can find basing itself on metrics of.

So How Does Google’s Site Indexing Work?

Depending on the meta tag you use, either index or no-index, Google will crawl and index your pages. If you’ve inserted a no-index tag, this means that that page won’t be indexed.

SEO experts recommend only allowing important parts of your website be indexed in order to achieve accurate rankings in search engines. Tags, categories and other not-so-important pages do not need to be indexed, and it may actually work better for your website’s rankings if they’re not. However, each website and its users are different! Some tag, category and other pages may be important for the site, users, and technical operations.

Factors such as your domain’s name, backlinks, internal links may affect the way Google’s spider crawls and indexes your site. The more backlinks you have from trustworthy sites the more likely search engines will find your site.

By using Google’s Search Console AKA Google Webmaster Tools you can check to see how Google is indexing your site and identify what can be done to improve its performance. The more content you add, change, and improve the more activity Google spider detects.