Google releases bots throughout the World Wide Web to crawl websites and index their content. However, there are many issues that may make it difficult for bots to crawl your website. Here are things you should do:
- Fix any server issue: You may have some severe server issues if your server returns multiple timeouts and works too slowly. Google may conclude that your website can meet high traffic. Bots can immediately detect 4xx and 5xx error codes. You need to immediately fix them and make sure that your webpages run smoothly. Use server logs to diagnose and correct likely server issues. This issue is more likely to happen if your website hosted in the shared server. Regardless of the type of your server, you can improve server performance using various methods, such as CDNs, caching, using newest PHP version, optimizing image sizes and enabling the asynchronous loading option.
- You need to make sure that Google always focuses on your webpages. Bots need to go deep into the deepest bowels of your website and if possible, index all of your webpages. Check log monitoring data to understand how Google crawls your website. You may combine data from SEO crawler tool and log data to find out various information. Make sure that all parts of your website is included in the latest sitemap update. When crawled, your pages shouldn’t return the 200 status code. Also, Google needs to crawl all your content, including images, videos, PDFs and others. Bots need to successfully crawl redirected pages. To ensure success, you should limit the depth of your website. A good way to do this is by using more generic categories and put as many as content into them, is possible.
- Optimize everything for Google bot: There are things that people can do, but bot can’t. As an example, Google bots can be blocked by the signup page and it can’t access your website further. Also, bots can’t sign up to newsletters and fill out contact forms, if you require users to do this to access deeper parts of your website. So, if you have essential content to share to the world, make sure that it’s not blocked by any user action. Instead of forcing bots to do something that they can’t complete, it is better to restrict them instead.
- Improve content quality: The quality of your content affects how Google bots crawl your website. This fact is supported by data from semantic analysis and log data. Well-written content that people love to read tend to be crawled and indexed better. You need to pay attention to keyword selections, keyword density, duplicate content issues and internal linking structure. If you have a few pieces of content that you want to prepare, then you need to focus on optimizing them. Reports from website audits could determine which pages that would benefit the most from overall quality. With various on-pages and off-pages optimization methods, Google will see that you make improvements and your website will be crawled better.