What is website crawlability and SEO indexability?

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Web crawlability? SEO indexability? What's all this about?
Tell me, what is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about positioning a website?

Content?

Backlinks, perhaps?

I admit, both are crucial factors for positioning a website in search results, but they are not the only ones.

In fact, there are two other factors that play a significant role in SEO, crawlability and indexability.

And yes, most website owners have never heard of these concepts.

Even worse, even minor indexability and crawlability issues can mean losing rankings, no matter how good your content is and how many backlinks you have.

What are traceability and indexability?
What affects crawlability and indexability?
How to make your website more crawlable and indexable?
Tools for managing traceability and indexability
How do trackers scan?

Deciphering how search engine bots work

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What are traceability and indexability?
To understand these terms, let's start by talking about how search engines find and index pages.

To understand the new (or updated) content of each of the pages on your website, these engines use what we know as spiders, bots that help them follow links on the web with one goal in mind: finding and indexing new web content.

As Google itself explains :

Spiders scan every link on web pages, just as if you were searching for content. They go from link to link, collecting data from those pages that they send back to Google's servers.

- Google

Matt Cutts, formerly of Google, explains this process in detail in a very interesting video that you can watch below:

Youtube video thumbnail
In short, these two concepts are related to the ability of search engines to access and index pages on a website and add them to their index.

Crawlability describes the engine's ability to access and crawl content on a page.

If a website does not have crawlability problems, then spiders will be able to access the content easily by email list canada following the links between pages.

Likewise, broken links and pages without exit links (dead-end) give rise to crawlability problems, or in other words, the inability of search engines to access specific content within the web.

Indexability, on the other hand, applies to the ability of search engines to crawl and add that page to their index.

Although Google can crawl the entire site, it may not be necessary to index every single page, usually due to indexability issues.