To build its search lists and evaluate a Google ranking for your website, the search engine embarks on a process called ‘crawling’.

Evaluating millions of web pages at a time, Google builds a list of websites it trusts and presents them to you when searching for keywords in the search bar. The process of gathering and judging such a huge volume of information on a daily basis is an immensely complicated process so what follows is a short introduction to the ideas behind Google ‘crawls’ and its importance to your law firm digital strategy.

Introducing the Googlebot

Googlebot is Google’s excellently-named internet crawling robot.  Googlebot doesn’t actually surf the internet but instead sends requests for web pages, downloading them entirely and passing them to Google’s indexing service for storage and presentation to users when they search for keywords in the search bar.

A very powerful tool, Googlebot can simultaneously request thousands of different pages and searches for them via the URL or links on other websites. By ‘harvesting’ these links, Googlebot builds up an overall picture of your website’s authority and quality and this is the process known as ‘crawling’!

To keep the index current Google will ‘recrawl’ websites that see a lot of changes to their content. Media sites, for example, will see more fresh ‘crawling’ than someone’s ignored blog page and Google will assign importance in the search rankings as a result.

The benefits of a ‘crawl’-friendly digital strategy are simple – getting your law firm website onto the first page of Google!