Googlebot? Crawler? Spider? These words are synonyms for the same concept … a robot that crawls the web.
Googlebot crawls web pages via links. It finds and reads new and updated content and suggests what should be added to the index. The index is Google’s intelligence center. This is where all the knowledge resides. Google uses many computers to send crawlers to every nook and cranny of the web to find these pages and read them. Googlebot is unique, and other search engines have their own.
Google Search Console is one of the most important tools to use. There, you can verify how Googlebot reads your site, discover crawl errors, and you can request to
re-crawl your site.
How does Googlebot see and read your website? Keep in mind that bots do not read or see as a human does.
Structured data helps Google read the content, so it can be visible within the search features. Structured data is a foundation for machines to understand your content.
Here's a simple example of JSON-LD markup...
<!-- JSON-LD markup generated by Google Structured Data Markup Helper. -->
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context" : "http://schema.org",
"@type" : "Article",
"name" : "Why Page 1 is Important:"
}
</script>
Organized data is coded in a specific format and written for search engines. Bots read this schema code and use it to render search results in a specific and richer way to optimize search intent.
What is Schema?
Schema markup is code, added to your website that adds more information about your website, which is displayed below the title tag. It helps search engines grasp the meaning of your content to facilitate better search results and offers additional information to users.
There are three common formats of schema markups in popular search engines:
⦁ JSON -LD = stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data ; a good resource to learn more is Schema.org
⦁ Microdata
⦁ RDFa
Essentially, schema markup code is a format to disambiguate and transform unstructured data so the crawler can make sense of the content.
This is a conceptual depiction...
"Website owners should focus on marking up the primary information they want to get across and avoid wasting time adding all the different kinds of markup as this can waste time and may not result in ROI. Also, prepare for any upcoming structured data developments by implementing markup now to get ahead of what Google will launch.”
(John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google (Deep Crawl Webinar Dec. 13, 2018).
Don’t ignore structured data. Organic search is getting increasingly competitive. Optimizing with structured data is just one way to direct traffic to your website.
⦁ Increase your click-through rates = CTR
⦁ Improve your search engine visibility.
⦁ Show up in the Google Knowledge Graph
