Crawling in a Nutshell

Crawling is the essential process where web pages are recognized in search engines such as Google. Right now, there are millions of web crawlers on the hunt for web pages with unique and not-so-unique content. The process is inevitable; every web page or document will be crawled, but programmers can instruct certain web pages to be exempted or follow specific instructions when crawling.

To put it simply, crawling is like following a trail of bait that spans to multiple directions at some point. Crawlers look for their pick-me-up—in the case of SEO, related results—and follow the trail to its base. When it finds another tasty trail in the base, the crawler will follow that, too, and end up in a new base. The main purpose of the entire process is to assess and collate website information along with pages that link back to those websites.

Because of crawling, search engines can deliver results much faster. Every time they deploy their crawlers, they create an index of the information they collected on how certain words relate to the various website locations. When the users look for what they need in search engines, the algorithms simply go through the index to match the keywords or search terms with the appropriate web pages.