Googlebot is the name of Google's web crawler. A web crawler is an automated program that systematically browses the Internet for new web pages. This is called web-indexing or web-spidering.

Google and other search engines use web crawlers to update their search indexes. Each search engine that has its own index also has its own web crawler. If you want to see your web pages on Google's search result pages, Googlebot has to visit your pages first.

Google has several bots: Googlebot (desktop), Googlebot (mobile), Googlebot Video, Googlebot Images, Googlebot News. For most websites, the Googlebots for desktop and mobile are the most important bots.

Basically, Googlebot and other web crawlers follow the links that they find on web pages. If Googlebot finds new links on a page, they will be added to the list of pages that will be visited next. If a link does not work anymore, or if there is new content on a web page, Google will update the index.

Googlebot uses sitemaps and databases of links discovered during previous crawls to determine where to go next. Whenever the crawler finds new links on a site, it adds them to the list of pages to visit next. If Googlebot finds changes in the links or broken links, it will make a note of that so the index can be updated.

If you want to get good rankings on Google, you must make sure that Googlebot can correctly index your web pages. If web crawlers can easily crawl your web pages, you will get better results.

If your web pages contain errors that prevent Googlebot and other web crawlers from indexing them, you cannot get high rankings. For that reason, it is important that you check the crawlability of your web pages.

The Website Audit tool in SEOprofiler analyzes all pages of your website and it informs you about things that you have to change to make sure that Google and other search engines can crawl your pages correctly.

The Website Audit tool also shows you how to remove the errors from your pages. In addition to the actionable items that help you to fix the errors on your pages, the Website Audit Tool also parse the data to show you the most important statistics.

For example, you get statistics about internal and external links, indexability problems, an analysis of the robots.txt file of the website, statistics about the speed of the pages, the topics on the pages, security settings, and much more.

"Google has posted a blog entry about misleading event markup code. Appearantly, Google has been receiving feedback from users seeing non-events like coupons or vouchers showing up in search results where 'events' snippets appear [...] Since this creates a misleading user experience, we may take manual action on such cases."

"We recently noticed that some of the answer boxes we worked really hard to get were just gone. No notice, no goodbye. We looked across the industry, as well as our tracked keywords for clients, and there did indeed seem to be something going on. [...]

Since October 27, there has been about a 14 percent increase in the number of knowledge panels Google has been displaying (at the time of this writing). This lines up fairly well with the timeline where featured snippets declined."

"Google has started showing more information about local businesses in some local knowledge panel results. It is implementing this by showing additional tabs of information above the local panel for (a) locations (b) about, and sometimes (c) Google Posts. [...]

It looks like Google started combining knowledge panels and local packs in mobile search results for businesses that have a knowledge panel displayed for their brand name search and local presence in the user’s area."

"Paid search competition is set to heat up significantly in the coming weeks, making it more expensive for advertisers to get ads on the first page and/or the top of page search results. [...]

Brands will certainly have to push bids more than 10% in order to remain competitive for some keywords, and should keep an eye on metrics like impression share and average position during the holidays to ensure they’re not slipping off the first page entirely."