Get to know Web Crawlers and their Functions

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 Did you know that when you use search engines to search for information on the internet, there is a program called a web crawler that collects all the data that appears on your browser?

 Web crawlers are responsible for browsing and collecting information from all websites on the internet.

 Although not many know of its existence, there are many benefits that can be obtained from web crawlers, friends of Qwords.

 Especially for those of you who are trying to increase the traffic and visibility of your website.  Want to know the full definition of a web crawler and what benefits you can get?

 Let's see the article below!

 What are Web Crawlers?

 A web crawler or web spider is a program or bot that is used by many search engines or search engines to search and collect data on the internet.

 Crawlers analyze website content and store the information found in the search engine's database.

 The process during which a crawler searches for content is usually called crawling, while the process of storing information is usually called indexing.

 Later, when you search for information on the internet, the search engine you use will find the most relevant information from their database and display it in your browser's search results.

 Uniquely, each search engine has a different web crawler.  Here are some examples of crawlers from popular search engines today:

 GoogleBot is used to index and store website content in the Google database.

 Bingbot is a crawler that Microsoft launched in 2010 to store data in the database of the search engine Bing.

 DuckDuckBot, the crawler used by the search engine DuckDuckGo to search and store data.

 Baiduspider is a bot used by Baidu, one of the most popular search engines in China.

 AlexaCrawler, a web crawler used by Amazon to determine Alexa's internet ranking.

 YandexBot comes from the largest search engine in Russia called Yandex.

 Slurp Bot is used by Yahoo to index and display website content in Yahoo search engine mobile search results.

 Because each search engine has its own web crawler, the method your website needs to get into each search engine's database is also different.

 However, considering that Google is the largest search engine today, it would be better if you optimize your website content according to the provisions of GoogleBot.

 Also Read: Knowing How the Google Search Engine Works

 Functions and How Web Crawlers Work

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 With so many websites and data on the internet, it is impossible for search engines to know which information is relevant without a web crawler.

 Search engines send web crawlers or web spiders to crawl and search for new content on the Internet.

 Searched content can be in the form of many things, ranging from website pages, images, videos, UR links, and so on.

 The crawling process starts from a list of URLs that web crawlers get from previous crawling activities and sitemaps of a website.

 A sitemap is a collection of web pages that have been published and can be accessed by users and search engines.

 With sitemaps, web crawlers can make the crawling process faster and more structured.

 For a further explanation of what a sitemap is and how to make it, Qwords friends can read our article that discusses a sitemap thoroughly.

 Next, from the collection of website pages, the web crawler will crawl to other links on your website sitemap.

 This process will be repeated again in the following link and will run without stopping if there are no problems with the sitemap and the website.

 So, what if your website has never been indexed in search engine databases?

 Don't worry Qwords friends!  Actually, you can also ask the web crawler to manually index your new content using Google Search Console.

 Although the crawling process sounds quite simple, web crawlers will not actually do crawling and indexing carelessly.

 There are several things that go into consideration such as:

 1. Relevance of a content

 One of the tasks of a web crawler is to determine which pages and content are relevant and important to display in a search.

 This process is usually done based on the number of backlinks from a website page.  The more backlinks your page gets, the better chance you have of attracting crawlers to your site.

 However, you should not be careless in attracting your content backlinks.  The reason is, spam backlinks with irrelevant sites can actually harm your website ranking.

 2. Configure Your Website's Robots.txt File

 The robots.txt file is a file that is used to tell which parts need and don't need to be searched by search engines.

 This file is usually located in the root directory of a website.  Before doing the crawling process, the web crawler will scan the robots.txt file on your website.

 If your website does not have this file, crawlers will freely enter and browse your website.

 If a robots.txt file exists on your website, the crawler will search the website based on the configuration in that file.

 Importance of Web Crawlers for SEO

 As discussed earlier, web crawlers search for content on the internet and store the relevant content in a search engine's database.

 Through this process of crawling and indexing, search engines determine and sort the most relevant content in a search.

 If your content gets a top ranking in the SERPs (search engine result pages), of course, your organic traffic will continue to grow.

 For this reason, it is very important to ensure that your website pages can go through the correct crawling and indexing process.

 Well, if you don't know how to make sure, you can use the tips and tricks in this article on how to get indexed by Google quickly.