Crawlability is the ability of search engine bots to negotiate through a website’s pages and the content available thereon. If your site is hard to crawl, then it will have some drag on your website's overall visibility within a search engine. Crawlability analysis will identify areas that search engines might not be able to access and validate whether virtually all portions of your site are discoverable by search engine crawlers.

In this blog, you will find important tools that will assist you in measuring and improving the crawlability of your website. We will also discuss some of the challenges and give tips for proper crawling from search engines, including Google.

How does crawlability aid our website?

Evaluating the crawlability influences the indexation and the ranking of the site. Should the search engines experience any challenges like non-working links, improper structure, and slow speed of loading, then your content is badly crawled and you are thrown out of sight. With the help of periodic crawlability assessments, it is possible to solve these problems before they affect SEO.

1. Google Search Console

Among all the tools to measure crawlability, Google Search Console is quite possibly one of the most extensive ones. This free tool tells what Google sees and how it crawls your site with details on crawl errors, indexing problems, and more importantly statistics.

Key Features:

• Crawl reports: Get to know which pages have been crawled and if there was any problem they faced.
• Sitemap submission: Fundamentally, make sure your XML sitemap is submitted to help Googlebot crawl through your site.
• URL inspection: Review the crawl status of separate pages and request a crawl for any of them as needed.

You can monitor crawl errors from the Google Search Console reports and make sure that your site is crawled and indexed often enough. For more on how best to use Search Console, read this blog on Unlocking SEO insights with Search Console.

2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Other common SEO tools include Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which is a desktop software used for exhaustive SEO audits and to assess crawl ability. It gives a full picture of how the search engines engage with your site by emulating how they crawl your site.

Key Features:

• As it scans each page, you may find out that you’ve got broken links, duplicate content, and redirect chains.
• View URLs and canonical tags to be properly indexed with meta tags.
• Such problems include a lack of, or overly complex, sitemaps that can prevent proper crawling of the sites.

For large websites, Screaming Frog is a must-have because the application allows exporting data and filtering it for a better analysis in terms of crawlability. It is most useful for uncovering constraints that might minimize a site’s crawl ability.

3. Ahrefs Site Audit

Ahrefs Site Audit is a cloud-based application that seeks to identify different SEO problems a site may have, with an emphasis on how easy the site is to crawl and its internal linking structure. The crawl diagnostics give real-time information on how to tackle crawling problems and enhance the health of the site.

Key Features:

• Scans through your site and identifies issues such as broken links (404 pages), blocked pages, and redirect loops.
• Enhances your site's internal linking structure to make it easy for search engines to understand your website structure.
• Offers information on the ability to crawl and index various URLs percentage-wise.

Ahrefs Content Gap is a part of the SEO instrument set for the tool, which makes it suitable for both technical SEO and content planning.

4. DeepCrawl

DeepCrawl is another all-inclusive tool suitable for large-scale website auditing, with key areas of specialization including crawl ability, indexing, and technical SEO reports. This helps to understand how search engines approach your site and what potentially can hinder the search engine from indexing certain sections of your site.

Key Features:

• Finds out pages that are not connected with other pages in the site and pages that have the same content, as well as defines crawl budget problems.
• I will offer a detailed picture of how your site fares in the aspect of mobile crawling.
• Allows real-time issue tracking; therefore, your crawlability metrics are as recent as the issue tracking exercise.

DeepCrawl is perfect for large companies’ sites that need continuous scanning and detailed inspection. To gain more insight into how crawlability falls into place in other technical SEO implementations, you can read this article that focuses on how to solve crawlability problems.

5. Botify

Botify is an effective bot that assists companies in controlling their website's accessibility in terms of crawling and optimization. Its primary advantage is the evaluation of all the crawl steps and recommendations on how to optimize the yielded results.

Key Features:

• Full-time information on how search engines crawl and index your site.
• A new possibility for a more detailed analysis of crawl budget usage to optimize resource consumption.
• Some new additions are provided by links to Google Search Console for a broader view of your crawl health.

Among other SEO tools, Botify provides detailed information on crawl ability, allowing for the successful management of both technical SEO factors and the general well-being of a website.

6. Ryte

Ryte is a quite similar tool that offers a deep crawl and audit of multiple aspects related to SEO. It is concerned with two aspects that might hinder search engines from indexing your site:

Key Features:

• Alerts on problems such as slow page loads, unavailable Web pages, and nonfunctional links.
• Detailed logs keep track of your site’s crawl budget and if it is being utilized properly.
• Provides recommendations on how to enhance mobile crawlability, an important consideration in today’s website.

Ryte also has built-in content optimization capabilities, so Ryte is ideal for those who pay attention both to SEO and UX.

Conclusion: The Most Recommended Strategies for Making Website Crawlability

To maintain a crawlable website, it's important to follow a few best practices:

• Submit and regularly update your XML sitemaps: Make sure that search engines can quickly find your site’s biggest resources.
• Fix broken links: Do a frequency check on your internal and external links to ensure you are not complicating the work of the crawlers.
• Optimize robots.txt file: Be careful not to prevent crucial URLs from getting indexed by your site’s search engine bots.
• Check mobile usability: With the recent advancement that Google has introduced mobile-first indexing, the site must be easily crawlable on the mobile version.

Finding crawlability issues is a continuous task, but if you have the appropriate tools and consider the crawlability factors discussed above, your website will always be crawlable.