Why Is It Important for Pages to Be Indexed by Google?
Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking are the most important parts of SEO. "To exist is to be perceived" - if your content doesn't appear in search results, it can be considered as not existing on the internet, and SEO becomes meaningless. These three processes form the foundation of how search engines discover, organize, and present content to users. Without successful crawling and indexing, even the most well-optimized content will never reach its target audience, making these initial steps critical for any SEO strategy. How search engines work:
Crawling
Search engines use robots (also called crawlers or spiders) to find content on the internet. These robots start from one webpage and jump to other webpages through links on the page, discovering new and updated content. Content can be web pages, images, videos, PDFs, etc., but regardless of format, content is discovered through links. For example, Googlebot starts crawling from a small number of web pages, then finds new URLs through links on these pages and adds them to its index.
Indexing
Search engines store and organize crawled content in a huge database called an index. When a page is indexed, it has a chance to appear in search results. The index is the data that search engines use to store all discovered content that they consider worth showing to users. Good website structure and internal links help improve indexing efficiency.
Ranking
When users search, search engines look for highly relevant pages in their index and sort them by relevance to solve the user queries. The higher the ranking, the more relevant the search engine considers the page to the query.
Of course, all three processes rely on complex Google algorithms and have separate names: Trawler, Alexandria, Mustang.