Here are what you are going to learn in this piece:
- What are search engine bots?
- How search engine bots work
- Types of search engine bots
- Optimizing your websites for web crawlers
What Are Search Engine Bots?
Search engine bots are known by many names. They are called spiders, crawlers, bots and even web wanderers. Big search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo among others rely on bots to crawl or index websites for updated content. When search engines index websites for newly posted contents, human users will be able to access these new posts within minutes for individual use.
Search engine robots do beyond crawling websites for newly published content. They also check links connecting web pages and other external websites. They index titles and subtitles and meta tags for keywords and other features that tell what a web page is all about.
How Search Engine Bots Work
Having established that search engine bots or crawlers index web pages for new contents, these spiders work according to some given criteria. The whole criteria are not completely known since search engines continue to modify their algorithms to suit new models. However, these spiders crawl new posts, internal and external links, sitemaps, HTML code validation, meta tags and photo alt tags for proper understanding of what a post or page is all about.
Search engine crawlers also analyze page codes to analyze their contents for proper indexing. It must be explained that that bots crawl web pages without the due knowledge and express authorization of the author, they can also be limited in how they function. You can include the robots.txt file into your page codes to limit bot indexing to a particular area of your site or even exclude their functions. This means you can stop web crawlers from spidering your websites if you enter the robots.txt code into your codes; but then, not all search engines honor this request.
Types of Search Engine Bots
There are hundreds of website crawlers but below are the most popular:
- GoogleBot
- BingBot
- Slurp bot
- DuckDuckBot
- Baiduspider
- Yandex bot
- Sogou spider
- Exabot
- Facebook External Hit
- Alexa crawler
Optimizing Your Websites for Web Crawlers
Search engine bots work automatically without any inputs from website owners, but they can be helped to serve your needs more in the following ways:
- Create a sitemap
- Remove and avoid duplicate content
- Be on top of how bots crawl your site
- Use internal and external links
It must be pointed out that there are also bad bots out there, but you mustn’t bother yourself about these if you’re doing everything right with your website.