Is Elie Berreby the Search Engine Marketing King? Is he a cybersecurity researcher? Could he be a senior SEO n00b as his official Linkedin title suggests?
Nobody knows except the Fortune 500 companies and European groups he advises regarding enterprise and global SEO. My guess? He is a n00b!
Crawling, rendering, and indexing are fundamental in technical SEO, each playing a critical role in how search engines interact with and rank web content.
This is the first step where search engines like Google send out bots, often called spiders or crawlers, to find new and updated content. This content could be anything from webpages, videos, images, to PDFs. The importance of crawling for technical SEO lies in ensuring that these bots can access and navigate your site easily. If a site has a poor structure, broken links, or if pages are not well-linked internally, crawlers might miss content or give up, leading to missed opportunities for indexing. Proper XML sitemaps, a logical site structure, and the use of the robots.txt file to guide (but not block unnecessarily) crawlers are key. Without effective crawling, even the best content remains invisible to search engines.
After crawling, search engines need to render the content to understand it fully. Rendering involves executing the webpage's code to see what the user sees. This step has grown increasingly important with the rise of JavaScript frameworks and dynamic content. If a site relies heavily on JavaScript for content or navigation, and this content isn't rendered properly, search engines might not index the full scope of the site. Technical SEO involves ensuring that search engines can render pages correctly, which might include techniques like server-side rendering or dynamic rendering for client-side rendered sites. This ensures that all important content is visible to search engines, not just the initial HTML.
Once content is crawled and rendered, it needs to be indexed. Indexing is where the search engine stores and organizes the information it has understood from the rendered page. Here, technical SEO plays a role in how effectively this content is categorized and stored in the search engine's database. Issues like incorrect use of noindex tags, canonical tags, or having duplicate content can prevent pages from being indexed or cause confusion about which version of a page should be displayed in search results. Ensuring that pages meant to be indexed are free from such issues is crucial. Moreover, structured data (like Schema.org markup) can enhance how content is understood and indexed, potentially leading to rich results or enhanced listings in SERPs.
