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A Guide to Search Engine Robots

Author : | Category : SEO | Last Updated :

You must have heard about a robot. A robot is a kind of program or a computer application that is created to perform some specific task. In this post, we will discuss the search engine robots.

spider

As an seo service, you must have heard of these terms very often. A search engine robot or spider is a computer program that is used by search engine to crawl and index a web page. To understand the concept of search engine robots, you must be familiar with the terms crawling and indexing.

Though we will not cover these two terms in this article, but for a general introduction Crawling is a process of reading a web page. As soon as search engines know about a new web page, they send their spiders to crawl i.e., read that web page and that is known as crawling. The second term is indexing. When search engine robots read a web page and find it informative, they add it to their index. A search engine index is a database where all the web pages are stored and processed. Each search engine has its index. A web page can appear in the search index only if it is indexed by the specific search engine.

If we talk about the processing of a web page, it starts with the robots. Search engine robots, by following the links or by any other method come to know about a new web page. Now, as search engines are always hungry for new content and information, robots go to the specific page and read it (Crawl it) to know about the page content. There are many things that a spider takes in consideration while reading a web page. These things include the Meta tags, image alt tags, keyword density, robots.txt file, sitemap, etc. In order to make your web page robots friendly, you must have all these things optimized properly so that crawlers can read it. Once the robot finishes reading the web page, it adds the page (the URL) to its index for further processing. This is the basic mechanism of a web page crawling and indexing by a spider.

Now, it is not always necessary that a crawled page will be indexed. Prior to indexing a page into its database, robots first check the database for an existing similar webpage and if they find that an exact page is already there in their database under different URL, they might consider it a duplicity issue and can take negative action against it. It is better to write only informative and original content as search engines want only new and fresh matter.

There is one another thing named as the Robots.txt file that I had mentioned earlier. A robots.txt file is a text file that is used to prevent the search engine robots from indexing a particular web page or multiple pages. This is the first file that a search engine spider reads on a website. This file tells the spider about the pages that we do not want to be indexed. These pages may include transaction or payment pages (for an ecommerce website), or any other pages. We can make changes in this file by adding or removing the pages.

This is all about search engine robots. It is a very important thing for quality seo services or companies so every person working in this field must be aware of this.


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