The search engine's mission is to catalog the entire Internet, and they need to do it quickly and efficiently. The size and scale of the entire Internet is massive. How many websites and how many pages are there? Way back in 2008, Google hit a milestone of 1 trillion pages crawled on the Internet. By 2013, Google was crawling around 30 trillion pages. Less than 4 years later, Google knew of 130 trillion pages. The rate of growth is staggering, and it is no small feat to discover all these pages.

If Google has trouble crawling or indexing your site, it will never make it into the search engine. Understanding how Google crawls and indexes all the websites on the Internet is critical to your SEO efforts.