🕷️ Crawling
- What it is: Crawling is when search engines (like Google) send out bots (called crawlers or spiders) to discover content on the web.
- Goal: To find pages.
- How it works: The bot goes from one link to another, reading your website’s code, images, text, etc.
- Example: Googlebot visits your site → reads your homepage → follows links to your about page, blog posts, etc.
👉 Think of crawling like exploring a library to see what books are on the shelves.
đź“– Indexing
- What it is: Indexing is when Google takes the content it crawled and stores it in its database (the Google index).
- Goal: To understand and save pages so they can appear in search results.
- How it works: After crawling, Google analyzes the content (keywords, images, structure) and decides whether to add it to its index.
- Example: Your blog post is crawled → Google decides it’s useful → it’s added to the index → it can now appear when people search.
👉 Think of indexing like adding a book’s details into the library’s catalog so readers can find it later.
🔑 Main Difference
- Crawling = Finding your website pages.
- Indexing = Storing and making those pages available in Google search results.
⚠️ Important:
If a page is not crawled, it will never be indexed.
A page can be crawled but not indexed (Google found it but didn’t add it, maybe due to low quality, duplicate content, or a noindex tag).
