Crawling (How Search Engines Discover Pages)
The process search engines use to discover and read every page on your site — the very first step before anything can rank.
…Before your site can rank, search engines need to be able to complete crawling of it efficiently, which is where our technical audit starts.…
What it means
Crawling is the process by which search engine spiders, or bots, systematically read and record the content of pages across the web by following links from page to page.
If a bot cannot reach or read a page — due to broken links, blocked resources, or poor site structure — that page effectively does not exist to the search engine, no matter how good the content is.
The first step to ranking
A page cannot rank if a search engine never successfully crawls it.
Reveals structural issues
Crawl problems often expose broken links, redirect chains, or orphaned pages hurting the whole site.
Impacts fresh content
Efficient crawling means new or updated pages get discovered and ranked faster.
DNA's Take: We regularly run crawl audits to find pages search engines are missing or struggling to reach, fixing structural issues before they quietly cap your site’s ranking potential.
Talk to our team