In search engines, crawling refers to the process of automatically visiting and analyzing web pages to index them and add them to a search engine’s database. Crawling is an essential part of how search engines work, as it allows them to discover new web pages and update their databases with new or changed content.
When a search engine crawls a web page, it follows links on the page to find other pages to crawl. It also analyzes the page’s content, such as the text, images, and links, to understand the topic and context of the page. The search engine then uses this information to determine how relevant the page is to different search queries and to decide where to rank the page in search results.
Crawling is done by a “web crawler” or “spider,” designed to visit web pages and follow links to other pages automatically. Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have their own web crawlers constantly running, visiting new pages and updating their databases with new content.
Webmasters and website owners can use tools such as Google Search Console to monitor how search engines are crawling their websites and to identify any issues that might affect the visibility of their websites in search results.
Also, See: Robots.txt In SEO