Have you ever wondered how Google and other search engines can give you search results so quickly?
Search engines are the gateway to easily accessible information, but web crawlers, their little-known companions, play a crucial role in collecting online content. Plus, they are essential to your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
Table of Contents
What is a web crawler?
Web crawlers go by many names, including spiders, robots, and bots, and these descriptive names sum up what they do: They crawl the web to index pages for search engines . Search engines don’t magically know what websites exist on the Internet. Programs have to crawl and index them before they can serve up the right pages for the keywords and phrases, or words that people use to find a useful page.
Think of it as shopping at a new store. You have to walk the aisles and look at the products before you can choose what you need. Likewise, search engines use web crawling programs as their helpers to search for pages on the Internet before storing the data from that page for use in future searches.
This analogy also applies to the way crawlers travel from link to link on pages. You can’t see what’s behind a can of soup on the supermarket shelf until you’ve lifted the can in front of it. Search engine crawlers also need a starting point – a link – before they can find the next page and the next link.
How does a web crawler work?
Search engines crawl or visit sites by passing between links on pages. However, if you have a new website without links connecting your pages to others, you can ask search engines to crawl your site by submitting its URL in Google Search Console. Trackers act as scouts.
They are always looking for links on pages and write them down on their map once they understand their characteristics. But website crawlers can only examine the public pages of websites, and the private pages they cannot crawl are called the “dark web.” Web crawlers, while on the page, collect information about the page, such as text and meta tags . The crawlers then store the pages in the index so that Google’s algorithm can rank them based on the words they contain and then retrieve them and rank them for users.
Also Read: How to do LinkBuilding for SEO
What are some examples of web crawlers?
All popular search engines have a web crawler, and the larger ones have several crawlers with specific focuses. For example, Google has its flagship crawler, Googlebot, which covers mobile and desktop crawling. But there are also several additional bots for Google, such as Googlebot Images, Googlebot Videos, Googlebot News, and AdsBot.
Other web crawlers you can find:
• DuckDuckBot for DuckDuckGo
• Yandex Bot for Yandex
• Baiduspider for Baidu
• Yahoo! Slurp for Yahoo!
Bing also has a standard web crawler called Bingbot and other more specific bots, such as MSNBot-Media and BingPreview. Its main crawler used to be MSNBot, which has since taken a backseat to standard crawling and now only covers minor crawling tasks.
Why web crawlers are important for SEO
SEO, that is, improving your site to improve its ranking, requires that pages be accessible and readable to web crawlers. Crawling is the first way search engines notice your pages, but regular crawling helps them show you changes and update you on the freshness of your content. Since crawling goes beyond the start of any SEO campaign, you can consider web crawler behavior as a proactive measure to help you appear in search results and improve user experience.
Also Read: 10 Smart Ways to Earn or Build Backlinks for Your Website
Tracking budget management
Continuous web crawling of newly published pages gives you the opportunity to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs). However, Google and most search engines do not offer unlimited crawling.
Google has a crawl budget that guides its robots:
• How often they crawl
• Which pages to scan
• How much server pressure to do
It’s good that there is a tracking budget . Otherwise, crawler and visitor activity could overwhelm your site. If you want your site to run smoothly, you can adjust web crawling by limiting crawl rate and crawl demand.
The crawl speed limit monitors search on sites so that loading speed is not affected or there is an increase in errors. It can be modified in Google Search Console if you are having problems with Googlebot. Crawl demand is the level of interest that Google and its users have in a site. Therefore, if you don’t have a large following yet, Googlebot won’t crawl your site as frequently as other, more popular sites.
Blocks for web crawlers
There are a few ways to purposely block web crawlers from accessing your pages. Not all pages on your site need to appear in SERPs , and these crawler blocks can protect sensitive, redundant, or irrelevant pages from appearing for keywords. The first block is the noindex tag, which prevents search engines from indexing and ranking a given page. robots.txt files, but it is useful to control the crawl budget.
