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?
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 seo 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.
By collecting and following links, robots manage tn transport themselves all over the internet. Think of it as an internet equivalent of the roads we use in our lives. Robots travel on the roads and read the signposts so they know what leads to where.
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.
There may be robots that you do not want to visit your website such as aggressive bandwidth grabbing robots and others. The ability to identify individual robots and the number of their visits is useful. Information on the undesirable robots is helpful also. IP names and addresses of search engine robots are listed at the end of this article in a resources section. These robots read the pages on your website by visiting your page and looking at the text that is visible on the page, and then looks at the source code tags such as title tags, meta tags and others. They look at the hyperlinks on your page. From these links, the search engine robot can determine what your page is about. Each search engine has its own algorithm to determine what is important. Information is indexed and delivered to the search engine’s database according to how the robot has been set up through the search engine.
Search engines don’t update instantly from moment to moment. No, their database updates can vary in the exact timing. However, once you’re in there, the bots will make a point to visit you frequently so as to pick up on updates and the like. If your site is down at the time the bot may not be able to update your site in the search engine database, so do keep that in mind. So, robots may be scary things in movies, but as you can see, as far as the internet goes they’re nothing but helpful tools to guide us in going from site to site. Embrace them, learn how to help them be more efficient, and work with them to get your web site highly-ranked so that you can maximize your visitors.