What is difference between crawling, indexing and caching?

by sohanjain

Posted: 12 years ago 17 replies

Hello,

What is difference between crawling, indexing and caching?

How caching, crawling and indexing works. Which one has higher priority? How methods are carried out. What Google do? Does it first caches the pages/websites or crawl the data on the page.

Note: Please do not post any definition or Wikipedia article as a source. Replies from senior member will be appreciated.

#caching #crawling #difference #indexing

SimpleSEOTips 12 years ago

In laymans terms:
Google crawls your site and then indexes what it sees as a cached version of the page.
The page may change in design before they crawl and then reindex the new page hence the term cache is used as almost a caveat to say that the page may've changed since they crawled it.
If your webpages aren't crawled then they can't be indexed. Making sure your site can be crawled by bots is a priority. Set up a Google Webmaster Tools account and then submit a XML sitemap to help Google crawl and index it.
Hope that helps.
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sanjon 12 years ago

Crawling- Google sends its spiders to your website..
Indexing- Google visited your website and has added you to its database..

Caching- Google toook a snapshot of your website when it last visited and stored the data in case your website went down or if there are some any other issues.
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- agendapal Banned 12 years ago
  
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  android45 12 years ago
  
  Crawling is something like Search engine bots visited your site and indexing is saving your information in database and caching is the more detail information of indexing like when visited and time , now you can know which goes first.
  
  Thanks
  
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dotnetappdevelopment 12 years ago

Crawling is the process of an engine requesting — and successfully downloading — a unique URL.
Indexing is the result of successful crawling. I consider a URL to be indexed (by Google) when an info: or cache: query produces a result, signifying the URL’s presence in the Google index.
It means, if we uploaded a new website, then first of all search engine crawler will read the site and after that, it will store all its contents in its Index Data Base in a different format, it will not place content as it was published. As a result, the site will appear in search results for optimized keywords.
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brookecaitlin 11 years ago

Crawling is where search engines spiders / bots move from web page to web page by following the links on the pages. The pages "found" are then ranked using an algorithm and indexed into the search engine database.

Indexing is where search engine has crawled the web and ranks the URLs found using various criteria and places them in the database, or index.
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greatestmj 11 years ago

Crawling means google has crawled your site atleast once and your site goes into their crawled database. Indexing means google has crawled your site and found it valuable enough to put it in their indexed pages database.
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CyborgX 10 years ago

"Crawling is where search engines spiders / bots move from web page to web page by following the links on the pages. The pages "found" are then ranked using an algorithm and indexed into the search engine database.Caching is where copies of web pages stored locally on an Internet user's hard drive or within a search engine's database. "
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- chrissmit 10 years ago
  
  Does Google base its ranking on the site that is cached?
  Or does Google crawl a site more often than it is cached?
  
  My site has last been cached on March 21st; I'm writing this April 3rd.
  Is my Google rank based on the content of the 21st March or could it be based on a later date?
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  Ralf Skirr 10 years ago
  
  Google crawls a site more often than it caches the site.
  
  You can check this easily by searching for some non-cached content. Google will show it in search results, even if it is not cached.
  
  For example: you added some new content to your site 3 days ago. The cache of your site home page is 3 weeks old. Googleing a sentence from your new content in quotes will still show the new content in results.
  
  Unless, of course, the site is so infrequently updated and unimportant that Google doesn't even bother to crawl it often.
  
  I find that my new blog posts are crawled and indexed within minutes or a few hours. The new page will be cached immediately or within 2 or 3 days. But it might take up to 2 weeks until I can find a cashed version of my blog homepage with the excerpts from new articles.
  
  These time frames are different for each web site.
  
  Thanks
  
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Hansons 10 years ago

Good tutorial about crawling, indexing and catching, it removed my doubts too, learned too.

Thanks
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Aaditya321 9 years ago

how to find when our site crawled and index whatever caching we can find easily with time as well as date.
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chrissmit

9 years ago

You can check what is Indexed (so also crawled) by going to Google and typing: "site:http://YourSite.com"
All without the " "

You can check what's Cached by going to Google and typing:
"cache:http://YourSite.com"
All with the " "

Thanks
1 reply

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Laureen Davis

7 years ago

Originally Posted by chrissmit

Thanks for sharing the simple way to check the whether the website is crawled or not. I think rather than using Add-on, using this technique is quite useful.

Thanks

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chandanthaver 9 years ago

Indexing- Added your website in to its database after crawling.
Crawling- when the website visited by the spider for checking the websites.
Caching- when the last visited and taking snapshot of the website.
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Manasarao 7 years ago

thanks for well explanation. understood clearly
- Thanks
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bodyrx 6 years ago

* Crawling is where search engines spiders or bots visit from web page to web page by the links on the pages.
* Indexing is where search engine has crawled the web and ranks the URLs found using various criteria and places them in the database.
* Caching is where copies of web pages stored locally on an Internet user's hard drive or within a search engine's database.
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Reputation Planners 6 years ago

Crawling is when google spider visits your sites pages one by one. Indexing is when google will save your sites information into its database.
And in caching it saves a new web page in the google cache database which is read to be indexed.
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What is difference between crawling, indexing and caching?

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