Know the Spiders of Search Engine

While going through the articles on SEO you might often come across the word SPIDER. It may raise your eyebrows as to what exactly they are? To satisfy your curiosity let us choose this topic for discussion. Search engine spiders are automated scripts or programs that search the World Wide Web in a systematic manner for a particular data. Different terms like web crawlers, web robots are used to describe them. They are basically used to retrieve information from a website. Search engines are the most frequent users of spiders and a search engine optimized page needs spiders to view the page.

How do spiders crawl a website?

Before a search engine can give you the information about a particular document it is important to know its location. Millions of web pages are searched and a list is build based on the keywords. It is from the content of a website that the search engine decides what the web page is all about. This work is done by the spiders, and the process of listing is known as web crawling. The spiders generally start searching the lists of servers and pages that are mostly used. The pages are explored, indexed and added to the database on a periodic basis. When a visitor submits a query, the search engine selects the most relevant data from the database and displays it. During the subsequent search, relevant words in the titles, subtitles and Meta tags are considered the most. This allows a faster operation and helps the users search more efficiently.

Google, MSN and Yahoo are the top search engines that provide the majority of traffic to a website. It is difficult to tell when a search engine will index you. It is advised to check weekly, but one should always remember not to re-submit a site too often. Sometimes, it is seen that site owners don’t want spiders to visit their sites. The reasons may vary but mainly if a page is a spam or related to a page of spam, owners try to restrict the spiders from crawling them. Robot.txt files can be used to disallow or allow spiders to visit a site.

As a crawler always downloads just a part of the web pages, it is highly recommendable that it downloads the most important pages. The quality of freshness needs to be maintained while crawling a web. The behavior of a spider generally depends on the combination of certain policies:

• A Selection policy is based upon the quality and content of a page.
• A Revisit policy states when to verify the changes of a page.
• A Politeness policy deals with how to avoid overloading the websites.
• A Parallelization policy states how to synchronize distributed web crawlers.

Over the years to come, search engine spiders will be the most popular topic of discussion. A good crawler should not only be effective but it should also have a highly optimized architecture. Thus, spiders are important not only to search engines but also to those who are web host service providers and who have a craving for knowledge.

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