What Do Spiders, Web Crawlers & Robots Have To Do With Web Content?

He looks scary. Really, he's just a harmless lovable Googlebot. No, he still looks scary.

So lately I’ve been talking about these robots and spiders that Google uses to index your site.  If you’re new to the world of writing content for web or simply just don’t know too much about the technical side of web content, you are probably wondering what on earth these web crawlers, spiders, and robots really are.  Is Google full of little machines that run around on their feet to find websites?  Okay, maybe you’re not thinking that.  But what really are spiders, web crawlers, and robots?

Web Crawlers

A web crawler is basically the generic name that covers “Web robots”, “bots”, “automatic indexers,” and the like.  This is an actual program that is built by a computer to browse the entire web in an very organized fashion.  It’s methodical and automated, and the process of what web crawlers do is known as spidering or web crawling.  Spidering is a means of providing constant, up-to-date results for search engines.  Each time one of these web crawlers or spiders goes out, it’s looking for fresh, new content, and putting that into a new equation for different Google results a week later for the same keyword.  Crawlers are also used in the world of spam to gather email addresses from valid sources, harvesting other information, and for doing website maintenance.

Google Bots

Googlebot is the official search bot software of Google.  This bot, or web robot, collects a great deal of documents from as much of the web as possible to create a searchable, effective index for Google search engine indexing.  Googlebots have an IP address that you will often notice when looking for sites that show your IP.  These Googlebots have been known to take up a huge amount of bandwidth and crash entire sites because of this.  Throttling the crawl rate is sometimes necessary, and so Google provides Webmaster tools for website owners to do this.

How You Can Benefit

Interestingly, because of the huge size of the web, only about 40-50% of the entire web gets indexed—even by the giant search engine leader Google.  This is why it is extremely important for you to have updated, constant content on your website.  Web content that is indexed by Google will be constantly updated, fresh, and very relevant.  If someone is looking up “purple scarves,” and you can offer them that, then make sure you have that keyword optimized in your web content.

With only half the web getting indexed, updated and relevant content for web is a must when it comes to your website.  Let Express Writers maintain and update your web content with relevant, affordable optimized material.

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