What Search Engine ‘Spiders’ Are And How They Work
Search engine ’spiders’ are robots that seek out webpages to display in search engines. Below we’ll discuss how they work and why they’re important.
These spiders actually have a rather limited scope of understanding and power available to them, far less than you would think considering they’re minions of such great and mighty names as Google and Yahoo. There’s a lot of things out of the scope of their understanding, such as frames, visuals such as movies or pictures, and scripting via java. Nor can they peek into parts of sites protected by passwords, or click buttons. Well, that’s what they can’t do. What CAN they do?
Spiders are able to determine the content of your page by looking at the visible text, the HTML code, and links. Based on the words it finds, the spider determines what the site is about using a complex algorithm to determine what is and isn’t important. Spiders also collect links from websites to follow later, which allows them to effectively hop from site to site to site. Since the entire internet is made up of links between websites, the robots use them to make their way through the internet as they search.
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.
When the robots return, the information they gathered is assimilated into the search engine’s database. Through a complex algorithm, this data is interpreted and web sites are ranked according to how relevant they are to various topics that would be searched for. Some of the bots are quite easy to notice – Google’s is the appropriately-named Googlebot, where Inktomi utilizes a more ambiguous bot named Slurp. Others may be difficult to identify at all.
Once in the database, the information becomes part of the search engine directory and ranking process. Indexing is based on how the search engine engineers have decided to evaluate information returned by the spiders. When you enter a query into a search engine, it uses several calculations behind the scenes to determine which results you’re most likely looking for, out of the sites the spiders have returned. The database selects the best matches and displays them. The database is constantly updated by spiders crawling websites over and over again, to make sure that the most up-to-date information is available.
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.
Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing expert who provides world class SEO Services to website owners. For more information visit: http://www.seorankings.co.za
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