05/30/2022

What Are Web Crawlers & How Do They Work?

Insights

5 min remaining

Search engines are the primary source of information. Web crawlers are essential to your search engine optimization strategy.

What is a web crawler?

Web crawlers are also known as search engine robots or site spiders. It crawls the Internet in order to index pages and locate them for search engines.

Search engines cannot automatically find websites on the Internet. The programs must crawl them before they can index them.

It’s almost like shopping in a new grocery shop.

You must first look at the products and walk around the aisles to find the product you want.

Web crawler software works in the same way as search engines. It helps them navigate the Internet searching for pages. They then store the data for future searches.

Crawlers who move between pages can also use this analogy.

You can’t see what the soup cans are containing unless you lift them from the front.

To find the next page, search engine crawlers must start at the beginning — a URL.

What’s a web crawler?

Search engines crawl websites by passing links among pages . You can ask search engines to crawl your site by entering the URL in Google Search Console.

Watch our video to learn more about how you can determine if your website is crawlable and indexable.

Crawlers can be described as explorers in a new country.

Website crawlers can only crawl pages that they know about once they have an understanding of them. They cannot crawl private pages, which are known as the “dark Web “.

Web crawlers collect information about the page while they are there, such as copy and meta tags. Crawlers then save the pages to an index so Google can rank them according to their contained words.

What are some web crawler examples?

What are some web crawler examples?

A web crawler is used by search engines that have large numbers of users. Many crawlers are assigned to specific areas of focus in larger search engines.

Googlebot is the main crawler. It is the main crawler for both desktop and mobile crawling.

These are just some of the web crawlers you might run across. 

  • DuckDuckBot for DuckDuckGo
  • Yandex Bot
  • Baiduspider for Baidu
  • Yahoo! Yahoo!

Bing also offers a standard web browser called Bingbot. However, it is now limited to standard crawling. 

SEO: Why web browsers are important

SEO is the process of improving the search engine rankings of websites by making them more searchable. Web crawling can also be proactive and help you rank higher on search results.

Continue reading for more information about the relationship between SEO & web crawlers.

Budget Management with crawl

You can find your newly published pages in search engine result pages (SERPs). Continuing web crawling is required to make this happen.

Google has a crawl-budget that guides its bots in:

  • How frequently should you crawl?
  • Which pages should I scan?
  • What level is acceptable server pressure?

A crawl budget is a good idea. Visitors and crawlers can overwhelm you.

To maintain site performance, you can adjust web crawling by setting the crawl rate limit and crawl demand.

The crawl speed limit monitors fetching websites to ensure that they load quickly and do not cause an increase in errors. 

The crawl request is the number of Google users who are most interested in your site.

Googlebot will not crawl websites that have low traffic but a large following.

Web crawlers face roadblocks

Web crawlers have many ways to prevent your pages from being indexed. 

Noindex is the first hurdle. This blocks search engines from indexing and ranking pages.

Another roadblock for crawlers is the robots.txt.html file.

This directive doesn’t have to be final as crawlers can choose to ignore your robots.txt files, but it is useful for managing your crawl budget.

Kobe Digital allows you to easily optimize search engine website crawls

Once you have learned the basics of crawling, it will be easy to answer the question “What is Web Crawler?” Search engine crawlers are able to help you locate and record web pages.

This is the core of your SEO strategy. A company that specializes in SEO will help you fill the gaps and provide your business with a solid campaign to increase traffic, revenues, and rank in the SERPs.

We’re ready to help your business succeed. Our clients love working with

Want to speak to an expert about our SEO services?

Please call us or email us today. We would love to hear your thoughts.

About the author

Kobe Digital is a unified team of performance marketing, design, and video production experts. Our mastery of these disciplines is what makes us effective. Our ability to integrate them seamlessly is what makes us unique.