Web crawling is a fundamental process used by search engines to discover, analyze and index web pages.
Crawling is the activity performed by automated programs called crawlers (also known as spiders or bots) that systematically explore the Web.
These bots navigate from page to page following links and gathering information about the content they encounter.
Purpose of crawling
The main goal of crawling is:
- Discovering new web pages and content
- Analyze and categorize the information found
- Create and update a web page index for search engines.
Relevance to search engines
Crawling is essential for:
- Enable search engines to provide relevant and up-to-date results
- Maintain a comprehensive and current web index
- Identify changes and new content on websites
If you want to learn more about this topic, we recommend reading: How to Manage Google Crawler Depth
