Search engine ’spiders’ are robots that seek out webpages to display in search engines. Below we’ll discuss how they work and why they’re important.
Robots actually have the same basic functionality that earlier browsers had. Just like these early browsers, search engine robots do not have the ability to do certain things. Robots cannot get past password protected areas. They do not understand frames, Flash movies, nor Images or JavaScript. Even if you use a robot, you have to click the buttons on your website. They can cease to function while using JavaScript navigation or when indexing a dynamically generated URL. A search engine robot retrieves data and finds information and links on the web.
The robot makes a list of the web pages in the system at the ’submit a URL page, then searches for these web pages in order from the list the next time it goes on the web. Sometimes a robot will find your page whether you have submitted it or not because other site links may lead the robot to your site. Building your link popularity and getting links from other topical sites back to your site is important. The first thing a robot does when it arrives is to check for a robots.txt file. This file tells the robots which sites are off-limits. Usually these are files that should be of no concern because they are binaries or other files that are not needed by the robot.
Submitting a new URL to a search engine adds this URL to the queue which the spiders are due to ‘crawl’ or visit. However, even if a URL isn’t submitted directly, the spiders usually find it through links from other websites. If you build link popularity, this will help the spiders find you faster. When the robots arrive, they’ll check your site for a file called ‘robots.txt,’ which will tell them what areas of the website they are not allowed to visit. Off-limits files may include things like binaries or other information that the spiders need not report back.
To ensure that searchers get the right results with the most relevant response to their query, quick calculations are done to see that this happens. Server logs and log statistics program results can be checked by the user to see what pages have been visited and how often. Some robots may be easy to identify such as Google’s ‘Googlebot’, while less well-known ones such as Inktomi’s ‘Slurp’ are not easily identifiable. Some robots even appear to be human-powered browsers.
A robot ‘reads’ your site by collecting data on any visible text, on tags you may have in the coding of your page, and on any links available. These are the things that determine what the search engines ‘think’ your content is about, so these are the things you really need to pay attention to when building a site that you want to have high visibility in search results.
If you’re interested in seeing which pages the spiders have visited on your website, you can check your server logs or the results from your log statistics. From this information you’ll know which spiders have visited, where they went, when they came, and which pages they crawl most often. Some are easy to identify, such as Google’s ‘Googlebot,’ while others are harder: ‘Slurp’ from Inktomi, for example. In addition to identifying which spiders visit, you can also find if any spiders are draining your bandwidth so that you can block them from your site. The internet has plenty of information on identifying these bad bots. There are also certain things can prevent good spiders from crawling your site, such as the site being down or huge amounts of traffic. This can prevent your site from being re-indexed, though most spiders will eventually come by again to try re-accessing the page.
Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing expert who provides world class SEO Services to website owners. For more information visit: http://www.seorankings.co.za
