SEO And Web Crawlers

06 October 2007 - By Ahson Rafiq - Filled in SEO

They go by a variety of names – bots, worms, web spiders, automatic indexers, web robots and web crawlers. What they are really are programs or automated scripts that browse the web in a methodical and automated manner. They are known best as web crawlers because that is what they do – ‘crawl’ a website in order to know what it contains. They are the tool used for SEO or search engine optimization.

Web crawlers provide search engines with up to date data as well as information. They provide the required information by creating copies of the web pages and the search engine later processes these and indexes them so a user can access them easily. This is the key factor in SEO and a lot of people refer to it as ‘spidering’.

Web crawlers are also a search engine’s maintenance managers. They harvest email addresses too for the search engine. There’s so much out there on the Internet, any search engine needs its ‘worker bees’ to go out there and then come back laden with information to report back to headquarters. However, just to give you an idea of how large the web is, just 16% of the web had been indexed in 2000 according to a study. But for the amount that is out there, these web crawlers do a marvelous job of fetching and carrying besides maintaining and reporting. The data is collected at lightning-fast speeds. Some search engines use parallel web crawlers so that when a URL is typed in, the page downloads much faster. These URLs can be assigned statically or dynamically. The web crawlers are designed to operate to a very high degree of efficiency.

This is why web designers constantly redo their sites in the hope that the web crawlers come and visit more often and rank them better. The keywords, the links, they are all an important part of making the website’s rankings high.

Are you designing a website? Then try and avoid frames as some web crawlers can’t get past them. Some can’t read pages that go through via CGI or database-delivery. Make your web pages static and use the database for updates. Look at your symbols in the URL too – some crawlers just can’t read symbols.