Basic SEO: Difference Between Crawling, Indexing, Rendering and Ranking

SEO is something that is very much needed in the field of internet marketing. Talking about SEO means talking about the efforts of webmasters in helping search engines find the website content they manage.

The discussion in this article is actually already available on Google’s documentation in very detail and clearly. It’s just that, sometimes, someone prefers to read light articles than read the official documentation.

Crawling

Crawling is the process of searching or discovering new or updated pages. The list of URLs crawled by Google is obtained from following a link or referral, reading a sitemap, or other means.

This crawling process will solve the data structure or content of the website that is being crawled. This is done to make it easier for Google to do classification, numeration, ranking, or other things.

Here it can be seen that the use of sitemaps is to tell Google that our website has a list of URLs that are ready to be worked on or crawled.

Rendering

Rendering is the process of rearranging content that has been split or extracted during the crawling process. At this stage, Google pins a mark on certain parts to be listed on the index.

Website content created by following Google Webmaster guidelines will be easily rendered by Google to the maximum. The use of microdata schemas is very helpful for Google at this stage.

Indexing

Indexing is the process of retrieving a page after it has been crawled to be added to the index or database. This indexing process is unpredictable. Not all URLs submitted through the sitemap are guaranteed to be indexed all. The length or speed of a URL entering the Google index is also not known for certain.

In simple terms, the indexing process can be said as Google’s process of recording a list of URLs that pass the selection to be displayed on its search page. If you do not pass the selection, the URL will not be found when searched through Google search.

Ranking

Ranking is the process of ranking URLs that have been indexed by Google. Many factors were used to give this rating. Google’s ranking algorithm is always changing every time to suit the needs.

Every webmaster wants his website content to rank well. By getting a good ranking means that the website content can be found on the first page of Google search pages.

To rank well on Google, a webmaster needs to follow the SEO guidelines provided by Google. They have to compete with competitors to get the desired ranking.