Saturday, January 22, 2011

The Know How Series - Understanding Search Engine Crawlers


While most internet users use a lot of search engines, hardly a handful really know how a search engine works. If you are an online marketer or your business relies heavily on the internet it becomes a prerogative that you understand search engines and web crawlers. Search websites provide data at the flick of a button or at a single click. Relevant searches are a little more specific but the processing occurs at a very high speed considering the number of websites out there. A crawler works looks to find and index your webpage to relevant sources so that it turns up in a search query. They are automated and periodically scan through sites to contribute to a database that will be used for searching. Though the process sounds like it is a relatively simple affair it includes compiling huge lists of keywords from pages all across a database that is exponentially growing. Once a search crawler or spider has indexed a website, search engines use algorithms to determine how high your site will figure on the search listings. Though a probable loophole in this process has been greatly exploited leading to a mass phenomenon employed by SEOs known as Spamdexing there have been some efforts on the part of the search engines to reduce this ripple effect by filtering out searches that return an excessive density of search terms.
A crawler not only visits the primary pages but also visits all given links that are related to a particular site and sites that connect to it. As has been said a multitude of times, crawlers are also highly attracted to content and keywords. Making sure that a search is related to a keyword not just in the heading but also in content is of high importance as it will help gain better and faster results in terms of search result placement. Further since the network of links can be accessed by web crawlers it is a good idea to have links to popular sites that are already linked to a search engine. This is easy to understand as the site will already be indexed with the engine and hence a crawler will validate the existence of the site much quicker. Many users who run websites often make the mistake of including buttons for links in their sites. Buttons will not be read by crawlers as they are non readable. Try to keep as much text as possible to gain the maximum output from search websites keeping in mind crawlers and spiders.

This article is taken from- http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Know-How-Series---Understanding-Search-Engine-Crawlers&id=4137285