Search engines employ automated processes or robots, casually known as \’spiders\’ or \’crawlers,\’ to find various sites. They\’re an important part of the whole internet infrastructure, but why is that so? What do they do exactly?
A search engine robot is a very simple program that has some basic functionality to help it understand web pages. However, spiders only have limited functionality to interpret websites: they cannot interpret frames, Flash video, images, or JavaScript; they can\’t enter password-protected areas and can\’t click buttons; they can be stopped by dynamically-generated URLs and JavaScript navigation. However, within HTML code, they\’re able to retrieve data by travelling through the web to find information and links.
Spiders are able to determine the content of your page by looking at the visible text, the HTML code, and links. Based on the words it finds, the spider determines what the site is about using a complex algorithm to determine what is and isn\’t important. Spiders also collect links from websites to follow later, which allows them to effectively hop from site to site to site. Since the entire internet is made up of links between websites, the robots use them to make their way through the internet as they search.
Links are collected from every page that is visited. These links are used in following those links to other pages. The robot gets around on the World Wide Web by following links from one place to another.
Once the spider has gathered all the information it needs, and based on how the spider is set up in the search engine, it will index the site information and send it to the search engine database.
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
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