How Google Crawls the Web

I seldom get into the more technical parts of SEO, but this is one of those super helpful lessons to understand, and it’s not too techy. Sometimes, SEO is easier to understand when you get how it all works on Google’s side. So, let’s quickly run through how Google crawls the web and why it matters to your website’s SEO.

Google crawls the web

The first thing to understand is that Google crawls the web (internet) by clicking on the links on your website and others to find out what information is available. There are two types of links on a website or blog. Internal links and External links.

What are Internal Links?

Internal links are links from one page or post to another page or post on your website or blog. For example, if you write a blog post about a seasonal trend and in that blog post you link to a product that you sell, that’s an internal link.

Internal links help in two ways.

They help the customer find more relevant information on your website or blog. They also help Google find more of the information on your website or blog to be indexed and show it to others searching for it in the future.

What are External Links?

External links go from your website to another one. They can help in several ways. External links from another website back to your website help build your Domain Authority, making it easier for you to rank for more keywords. The higher your DA gets, the easier it is to rank for keywords. Google sees the link from one website to another as an endorsement of sorts; it’s a way of saying, this is a good site, check it out too. 

External links can also help your customer if you’re linking to something they’re going to need to research or find. It’s a good idea to include them.

Google uses all these links to crawl the web and index the content.

What does index the content mean?

When Google crawls a website, it takes note of what the pages and posts are about (if they’re optimized well) and then adds that information to its index so that the next time someone searches for a keyword related to content you have on your site, it knows it’s there and can pull it up and show it to them. And then, hopefully, they click to check out your website. 

I hope that makes it easier to understand how Google crawls the web and why links help your SEO. Let me know if you have any questions. I teach more of this in my Simple SEO class. If you’re interested in learning SEO, you can check it out here.