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Digital Marketing & SEO vocabulary · Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Crawl

Meaning in digital marketing & SEO, with examples

/krɔːl/verbCommon term

In digital marketing & SEO, crawl means: To visit web pages automatically and follow their links, which is how search engine bots discover and read content.

In Turkish: taramak

How it is used

Used about search engines (Google crawls the site) and SEO tools (we crawled the site to find errors). The bots are called crawlers or spiders. A page has to be crawled before it can be indexed.

Example sentences

  1. Google crawled the new pages within two days of launch.

  2. Let's crawl the site with an SEO tool to find broken links.

Common collocations

  • crawl a site
  • crawl budget
  • crawl errors
  • search engine crawler
  • indexTo add a web page to a search engine's database so that it can appear in search results. As a noun, 'index' is that database itself.
  • sitemapA file, usually in XML format, that lists the important pages of a website so that search engines can find and crawl them more easily.
  • technical SEOSEO work on how a site is built, so that search engines can crawl, render and index it; it covers things like speed, redirects and sitemaps.
  • SEOShort for search engine optimization: the work of improving a website so that it appears higher in unpaid search results and gets more visitors.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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