Google Crawlers - how do they work?
Hello, I am new to SEO and I've got some doubts about how the crawlers work. I tried to look up for info but I couldn't find an answer to this specific question. As for my understanding, page speed is important to Google in order to index pages, and core web vitals like First Contentful Page (FCP) are important for a good ranking.
I know as well that server response affects the FCP performance.
If I want to serve an audience in two specific countries and my traffic comes predominantly from these two countries, in order to speed up the server response, how should I choose the server location? How does Google detect the page speed? Is that via crawlers? When Google crawlers analysise web pages, where do "they come from?". If Google sends its crawlers from the US, as an example, and my server is in the UK, it'd detect a slower server response.
Please, if anyone can help clarify.
Thanks
Hi @fabrizioas, welcome to SEO forum.
If you want to optimize your server response for two countries, your responses should be quick specially for these countries. That means
- you should host locally
- optimize your website speed - minimize number of requests, their time, size of assets client has to read/download (scripts, images, videos, ...)
I assume the two countries you're optimizing for are close geographically, which means you don't necessarily need CDN and having server connected to a local backbone will be well enough.
In other cases, if you need to optimize for larger audiences across the world, CDN or anycast are both great ways to speed up for people from different places.
As for Google Crawler, I wouldn't be worried. They have virtually endless resources distributed across data centres all over the world and they can tell your target index by various signals (including content itself, of course), so it's safe to assume that they just know...