Why Website Crawling is Essential
Running an SEO Audit on your homepage is a great start, but it doesn't give you the full picture. A website is an interconnected web of pages. If a deep internal page is broken, it can bleed authority and frustrate users. Crawling automates the process of checking every single page on your site.
How Search Engines Crawl
Bots like Googlebot use a process known as spidering. They start at a seed URL (usually your homepage or an XML Sitemap), read the HTML, and find all the <a href="..."> tags. They add those URLs to a massive queue and visit them one by one. Our crawler simulates this exact behavior to give you a "bot's eye view" of your site.
What to Look For
When reviewing your crawl results, pay close attention to:
- Status Codes: Anything other than
200 OKis a potential problem. 404s (Not Found) mean broken links exist on your site. Fix them immediately. - Missing Titles: If the crawler reports "(No Title)" for a page, search engines won't know what that page is about.
- Duplicate Titles: Ensure no two pages have the exact same title tag, as this confuses search engines.
- Crawl Depth: If it takes the crawler 5 or 6 "hops" (clicks) to reach a page, Google might consider that page unimportant. Keep important pages close to the homepage.
💡 Pro Tip:
If our crawler can't find a page, it means there are no internal links pointing to it. This creates an "Orphan Page." You can check if Google knows about it by looking at your Sitemap.