Crawlers are programs that traverse the web to gather information for indexing by search engines. When a crawler visits a site, it follows a hyperlink. After reading the content of the site, the crawler follows the embedded links to follow them to another site. Crawlers continue crawling until all websites that have links to another site are visited and data is indexed for every site that has links to another site. In essence, crawlers follow links to other sites on the internet.
Crawlers play an important role in SEO, so why should you care?
Crawlers have a significant impact on search engine optimization in multiple ways. The easiest to crawl websites will be prioritized over those that are difficult to crawl. Having easy-to-navigate pages, organized so that the most important ones are easily accessible from the home page, makes your site easier to read not only for crawlers but also for visitors. In addition, sitemaps assist crawlers in identifying the most important information on a website.
Crawlers also follow links coming to and going from a website, along with internal links within the site. Crawlers need access to crawlable internal links on your site in order to index all of the pages, while external links (links that point to or from your site) indicate your site’s reputation as well as its quality of content.
Third, crawlers index all pages that aren’t marked nofollow on a site. Search engines also check for keywords so they can determine what words and phrases the page will rank for. The program also detects duplicate content, such as content copied from other websites, so that the content of the website is original.
Does a crawler differ from a spider?
The difference between a crawler and a spider is something that Go Up clients often ask us about. There is no difference between the two. As the program crawls the web, the spider is an appropriate moniker for the program. As well as crawlers, bots and robots are also commonly used terms.
Is it a good idea to always allow web crawler bots access to web properties?
Depending on a number of factors, that is up to the web property. In order to index content, web crawlers make requests that the server must respond to, just as a human visiting a website does or a bot visiting a site. If a website contains a lot of content or has a large number of pages, the owner may wish not to allow too much indexing, since excess indexing could overtax the server, or drive up bandwidth costs, or both.
There may be a variety of reasons why website owners do not want web crawler bots crawling their sites. In some cases, websites that provide users with the option to search on the site may decide to block users from viewing the search results pages, since most users don’t use them. In addition, we should also block auto-generated pages that are useful only to one user or to a tiny group of users.
