Website crawling is an automated retrieval of web pages for their contents to be searched. Crawlers are software processes that search websites and request their contents as browsers do. After that, an indexing process goes through the content and picks up the content.
There are two different types of website crawling. ‘Spidering’ or Site crawls is when an attempt is to crawl an entire site at once. The crawler grabs links from that page and then crawls the site for other content.
When the crawler attempts to crawl a single page or post, it is known as Page crawling.
This article discusses some tips for crawling millions of web pages.
Contents
Prepare Your Site For Crawling
Before starting a crawl, fixing problems that might arise during crawling is essential. This advice may sound redundant, but a slight issue multiplied by a couple million may become a critical problem when it comes to huge sites.
Having a tool that gives you insights on your page may be helpful.
See Also: Google: Adding Individual Pages Does Not Impact How We Crawl Your Site
Full Server Access
Firewalls and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can slow down or block specific IP addresses from crawling a site.
Hence, it is necessary to know all security plugins, CDNs, and server intrusions that may prevent a website crawl.
Server Errors
Server Error logs are a gold field of information that can tell us a lot about the errors in a well-crawled site.
The Google Search Console Crawl Stats should be the first place you look. Any errors in the report should be identified and fixed before crawling.
Crawl While Off-Duty Hours
In an ideal scenario, crawling a site should be unintrusive, and a server should be able to handle crawling and show web pages to real-site visitors. In contrast, it might be handy to test how well the server works under load.
This is where real-time analytics come in. You will see how well the server responds to the crawl and the site’s real-time visitors.
If the server is becoming slow and unresponsive, it may be best to crawl during off-duty hours.
Internet Speed
Having excellent internet speed can be the difference between a crawl that takes days to complete in comparison to a crawl that takes a few hours to complete.
Usually, the fastest internet connection is via an ethernet connection, not Wi-Fi.
Conclusion
Websites can be pretty quirky and difficult to crawl, especially huge ones. We hope the tips we have listed here help you and save your time and effort.