Difference Between Crawling and Indexing

The techniques of SEO in itself carry a world that is vast and constantly evolving. Well, the entire technique focuses on making your website appear on the better ranks of the search engine results and generate traffic to the website.

The world of SEO keeps on introducing new terms every day and most of the times, most of them seem similar, but not every time can be justified. The term "crawling" and "indexing" and these two terms act as the main accomplishments of SEO.

Many people get confused with these two terms and often associate them as the same, but in reality, they both are different from each other are closely related. Today we will try to throw some light on the difference between these two very important terms, "crawling" and "indexing".

Crawling otherwise known as spidering are terms used by most of the search engines. Many of them have come up with their own specific term to justify the word crawling. The crawling is the first stage where the search recognizes you web page and show it in your results. For this, it is necessary that you perform necessary techniques to attract the search engines to your website.

Once the crawlers or the bots, they send the information to their algorithms and based on that along with what the searcher have typed in the search engines index your page. But, it is not always necessary that if the crawlers are crawling into your page, it will be indexed. There can be various reasons for your page getting crawled and most common reason is having an XML sitemap.

Indexing is perhaps the next step after the search engine has done crawling in your page. It is obviously not necessary that if the search engine's crawler is crawling into your page, it will be indexed, but if the search engine has indexed your page, it must have been crawled before.

Once your page has been indexed, search engine then decides that how your page will be found on their search engine results. Then, the search engine decides about the keywords and what ranking should your page get. This is done of many other factors.

This is the thing for which the entire SEO technique is working for.