What Are Web Crawlers
How Web Crawlers Work
Think of a web crawler as your trusty sidekick when it comes to online marketing.
This little guy is responsible for scouring the internet in search of new and relevant content to add to your website. Without a crawler, you would have to do all of that digging yourself- and who has time for that?
Let your crawler take care of things while you focus on more important things (like running your business!). Not sure how to get started with a crawler? Keep reading! We'll walk you through everything you need to know.
In this article, we will explain how web crawlers work and how they play a role in the entire search engine environment.
It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of prospective customers.
Hence it is important to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.
Search engines use robots called crawlers or spiders to build their index of websites.
Search Engines use spiders to index websites.
When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site.
A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system.
A spider visits a website, reads the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags, and also follows the links that the site connects.
The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed.
It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well.
Some spiders will only crawl a certain number of pages on your site.
The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed.
The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.
A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content, and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.
When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web.
Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.
One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing.
Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages on the Web.
By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.
