What is Crawling?
How search-engine bots discover pages by following links, sitemaps, and directives. If a URL is never crawled, it cannot be indexed no matter how good its content is.
Related terms
Crawl Budget
The number of pages a search engine will crawl on a site in a given period, driven by server capacity and demand signals. Large or slow sites must spend it on indexable, valuable URLs.
Log File Analysis
Reading server logs to see which URLs bots actually fetch, how often, and with what status. Logs reveal crawl waste and orphaned discovery that crawler simulations can only guess at.
XML Sitemap
A machine-readable list of canonical URLs worth crawling, optionally with last-modified dates. One file holds 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed; larger sites segment by template or locale.
Technical SEO
The crawling, indexing, rendering, and performance work that lets search engines reach, understand, and serve your pages. It covers directives, architecture, speed, and structured data rather than words on the page.
Indexing
Storing and organizing crawled pages so they can be retrieved for queries. Indexing is selective: crawled does not mean indexed, and indexed does not mean ranking.
Robots.txt
A plain-text file at the domain root telling compliant crawlers which paths they may fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing: blocked URLs can still be indexed by URL if linked.