Crawlability
Crawlability is the ability of search engine crawlers to access, navigate, and read the content of your website's pages without encountering technical barriers.
If search engines cannot crawl your pages, nothing else matters — the best content in the world will not rank if Googlebot cannot reach it. Crawlability issues include: robots.txt blocking important pages, broken internal links, server errors (5xx), extremely slow response times, and JavaScript-rendered content that crawlers cannot execute.
Verify crawlability by checking your server logs for Googlebot requests, using Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool, and testing with Indxel's crawl command. Pay special attention to JavaScript-heavy applications where content may only appear after client-side rendering.
Indxel's CLI crawls your site like a search engine would, identifying unreachable pages, broken links, redirect chains, and pages that return non-200 status codes. Run `npx indxel crawl` to map your site's crawlable structure.
Related terms
Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is the number of URLs Googlebot will crawl on your site within a given period, determined by crawl rate limit (server capacity) and crawl demand (page importance).
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of a website that instructs search engine crawlers which URLs they are allowed or disallowed from accessing.
Renderability
Renderability is the ability of search engine crawlers to execute JavaScript and render a page's content as it would appear to a user in a browser.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO encompasses the server-side and infrastructure optimizations that help search engines efficiently crawl, render, index, and rank your website's content.
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