Optimize website in 2024 for Googlebot: If you have created any blog or site and wants to appear top on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) then you should optimize your website for Googlebot. However, it is very technical and advance level of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
What is Googlebot? Googlebot is a computer program which crawls the web and collects data for indexing purpose. Simply, it is a web crawler software used by Google and other search engines have their own. There are two different types of crawlers viz. Mobile crawler and desktop crawler. Did you know? Starting July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing is enabled by default by Google for all new websites.
If you have converted your site for mobile user then the majority of Googlebot crawl requests will be made using the Smartphone crawler. However, if you are not publishing mobile version of the content for your user then the majority of crawls will be made using the desktop crawler.
What is a Web Crawler?
A web crawler or bot is an automated program that collects data from the internet through crawling links (Internal links and External links) on a website.
“Crawler” (sometimes also called a “robot” or “spider”), visits your site for downloading newly published contents or updated/modified posts and store them for data analysis. Thereafter, it suggests what should be added to the index.
How does Googlebot work?
First time Googlebot automatically visit publicly accessible websites and follow links to crawl every webpages. You might have submitted sitemap of your newly created website to Google Search Console. In that case it helps robots/crawlers to find new webpages on your site.
Google crawlers (user agents) uses sitemaps and databases of links discovered during previous crawls to determine where to go next. Whenever the crawler finds new links on a site, it adds them to the list of pages to visit next. Similarly, if the web crawlers finds changes in the links or broken links, it will note that so the index can be updated.
Different Robots and Crawlers
There are several different types of Crawlers used by various products and services at Google. List of Crawlers that covers most of the robots you might see on your website:-
- APIs-Google
- AdsBot Mobile Web Android
- AdsBot Mobile Web
- AdsBot
- AdSense
- Googlebot Image
- Googlebot News
- Googlebot Video
- Googlebot Desktop
- Googlebot Smartphone
- Mobile AdSense
- Mobile Apps Android
- Feedfetcher
- Google Read Aloud.
All these different bots have different user agents identifying them. We have shared with you most important ones:
| Name | Description of the Crawler |
|---|---|
| Googlebot (Desktop) | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html) |
| Googlebot (Smartphone) | Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) |
| Googlebot (News) | Googlebot-News |
| Googlebot (Images) | Googlebot-Image |
| Googlebot (Video) | Googlebot-Video |
How Googlebot visits your site
Accessing Site by Googlebot: Googlebot shouldn’t access your website more than once every few seconds on average. It run simultaneously by thousands of machines located near the sites to improve performance and scale as the web grows.
Googlebot can crawl the first 15MB of an HTML file or supported text-based file. After the first 15MB of the file, Googlebot stops crawling. Other web crawlers may have different limits.
To find out how often Googlebot visits your site and what it does there, you can dive into your log files or open the Crawl section of Google Search Console. Googlebot crawls from IP addresses in the United States available in JSON format.
Note that Google does not share lists of IP addresses that the various crawlers use since these addresses change often. To find out if a real Googlebot visits your site, you can do a reverse IP lookup.
Spammers or fakers can easily spoof a user-agent name but not an IP address. You can verify if a web crawler accessing your server really is a Googlebot. There are two methods for verifying Google’s crawlers viz. Automatically and Manually.
You can also use the robots.txt to determine how Googlebot visits your site. There are better ways to prevent your site from being indexed.
Google Search Console
Search Console is one of the most important tools to check the crawlability of your site. There, you can verify how Googlebot sees your site. You’ll also get a list of crawl errors for your to fix. In Search Console, you can also ask Googlebot to recrawl your site.
Optimize for Googlebot
Getting Googlebot to crawl your site faster is a fairly technical process that boils down to removing the technical barriers that prevent the crawler from accessing your site properly. It is a fairly technical process, but you should familiarize yourself with it. If Google can’t crawl your site perfectly well, it can never make it rank for you. Find those errors and fix them!
If you want to do advanced stuff to optimize the crawl performance of your site, you can use tools like the SEO Log File Analyser.
Conclusion
Googlebot is the little robot that visits your site. It’ll often come if you’ve made technically sound choices for your site. If you regularly add fresh content, it’ll come around more often. Sometimes, whenever you’ve made large-scale changes to your site, you might have to call that cute little crawler to come at once, so the changes can be reflected in the search results as soon as possible.