What is the difference between indexing and crawling?

Indexing is the process of placing a page , while crawling is simply when search engine bots are actively crawling your website, either for the first time to prior to indexing or for update purposes. Both of these processes are necessary for your website to appear in search engine results.

What Happens During Crawling

When Google and other search engines crawl your website, it means they're in the process of analyzing your pages, including meta data and all content. During this process, search engine bots will either accept and index or reject all pages that give permission for crawling, depending on whether or not your website appears to be a form of spam.

To make the crawling process faster, you should make use of XML sitemaps.

How Indexing Works

When Google and other search engines index your pages, it means they're able to appear in search results. However, it doesn't guarantee that your website will rank well. You can still have indexed pages and be far behind page one in search results. This is why it's important to make sure all of your content is of the highest quality and uses white-hat SEO strategies.

Google in particular is extremely strict regarding SEO practices, and if you want to rank well, you need to put plenty of effort into content creation and optimization.

Keep in mind that Google and other search engines don't crawl websites only once, which means that you can update your content if you want better rankings. However, they won't crawl your website every day either, so you should be patient when waiting for the next crawl to take place.