Automated robots from search engines, sometimes called "spiders" or "crawlers", are the seekers of web pages. How do they work? What they actually do? Why are they important?
One would think that with all the fuss about indexing web pages to add the search engine databases, that robots would be great and powerful beings. Evil robots of search engines only basic functionality like that of early browsers in terms of what can be understood in a web page. As early browsers, robots can not do certain things. The robots do not understand frames, Flash movies, images or JavaScript. They can not enter password protected areas and can not click all the buttons you have on your website. Can be stopped cold while indexing a dynamically generated URL and slowed to a stop with JavaScript navigation.
How Search Engine Robots Work?
Think robots search engines and automated programs data recovery, traveling all over the web to find information and links.
When you submit a website to a search engine on the Submit a URL page, the address is added to the robot's queue of websites to visit on your next foray out on the web. Even if you do not directly submit a page, many robots will find the site because of links from other sites pointing to yours. This is one reason why it is important to build your link popularity and get links from topical sites back to yours.
Upon arriving at your website, the automated robots first check to see if you have a robots.txt file. This file is used to tell robots which areas of your site are beyond the reach of children. Typically, these may be directories containing only binaries or other files the robot does not have to worry about.
Robots collect links from each page they visit, and then follow the links through other sites. Thus, in essence, follow the links from one page to another. All World Wide Web is made up of links, the original idea is that you can follow links from one place to another. This is how the robots move.
The intelligence about the indexing of pages online comes from the search engine engineers, who design the methods used to evaluate the information that the robots of search engines to retrieve. When inserted into the database search engine, information is available for searchers querying the search engine. When a user enters their search engine query in the search engine, there are a few quick calculations done to ensure that the search engine presents just the right set of results to give visitors the answer relevant to your query.
You can see which pages on your site robots search engines have visited by looking at server logs or the results of your log statistics program. The identification of robots will show you when visiting your site, which pages are visited and how often they visit. Some robots are easily identifiable by their user agent name, such as Google "Googlebot", while others are a little darker, like Inktomi "Slurp". Still other robots may appear on their records that are not easily identified, and some of them may even seem that human-powered browsers.
Along with the identification of individual robots and count the number of visits, the statistics may also show aggressive grabbing robots or robots band width that you want, you can visit their web site. In the resources section of the end of this article, you will find sites that list names and IP addresses of the robots of search engines to help you identify them.
How do I read the pages of your website?
When the search engine robot visits your page, the text is visible on the page, the content of the labels of several in the source code of your page title tag, meta tags, etc. and hyperlinks in the page. Of words and the links that the robot is found, the search engine decides what your page is about. There are many factors used to determine what matters and each search engine has its own algorithm to evaluate and process information. Depending on how the robot is configured through the search engine, information is indexed and then delivered to the database search engine.
Information given to the database becomes part of search engine and sorting process of the guide. When visitors search engine sends your query, the search engine digs through your database to give the final list that is displayed in the results page.
The database search engine update at different times. Once you are in the database search, the robots keep visiting regularly to pick up any change in its pages, and to ensure they have the latest information. The number of times you visit depends on how the search engine sets up its visits, which may vary per search engine.
Sometimes visiting robots can not access the website you are visiting. If your site is down, or is experiencing an enormous amount of traffic, the robot can not access your site. When this happens, the website can not be re-indexed, depending on the frequency of the robot visits to your website. In most cases, robots can not access your pages try again later, hoping that your site will be accessible then.