Understanding Crawling and Indexing
What is Crawling?
Crawling refers to the process in which search engine bots, like Google bots, visit a website to analyze its content. This helps search engines understand the content and add it to their database.
What is Search Engine Indexing?
Indexing is the process by which search engines organize and store the crawled data for quicker retrieval in response to user queries. It involves categorizing and storing information for various search queries.
Search Engine Ranking
After indexing, search engines prioritize and display relevant websites in search engine result pages (SERPs). Ranking depends on factors like relevance, page rank, website authority, backlinks, and more.
Fixing Crawling and Indexing Issues
Addressing crawling and indexing issues involves several technical settings. Here's how to do it:
1. Privacy Settings
- Access your Blogger dashboard and navigate to the "Settings" tab.
- Locate the "Privacy" option and ensure the "Visible to search engines" setting is turned on. If it's off, your web pages won't be indexed.
2. Crawlers and Indexing Settings
- Scroll down to the "Crawlers and indexing settings" section.
- Turn on the "Custom robots.txt" option.
- Add the following robots.txt file (replace "example.com" with your website URL):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /tag/
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
If your website has more than 500 pages, add additional sitemap lines with appropriate start-index values to cover all pages.
3. Custom Robots Header Tags
- Enable the "Custom robots header tags" option.
- Configure the three header tags as follows:
- Homepage tags: Select "all" & "noodp" options and save.
- Archive and search page tags: Select "noindex" & "noodp" options and save.
- Post and page tags: Select "all" and "noodp" options and save them.
4. Submit Sitemap in Search Console
- If you don't have a Google Search Console account, create one and verify your domain.
- Access the Search Console and click on the "Sitemap" option.
- Enter your sitemap URL in the following format and click "Submit":
https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
You can also submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools or link your Search Console with it.
After submitting the sitemap, search engine bots will automatically crawl and index your website.
Addressing Crawling Issues
Sometimes, crawling issues arise due to budget limitations or redirect problems. To address them:
- Regularly update your website and publish new articles.
- Focus on interlinking between articles to help search engines discover new content.
- Promote articles on social media to attract initial traffic.
- Fix broken internal links and redirect loops.
- Improve page loading speed.
- Resolve duplicate content issues.
- Consider using an HTML sitemap in Blogger.
Conclusion
By following these steps and best practices, you can resolve crawling and indexing issues on your Blogger website. Check your robots.txt file and meta tags carefully. If you continue to encounter problems, please let me know in the comments.