How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers
Most of your prospective customers will find your website through a search engine. Understanding how search engines work and how they find and present information is vital to your long term business success.
Search Engines use spiders, also called crawlers, to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A 'spider' is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's meta tags and also follow the links on the site. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don't create a site with 500 pages!
The spider will periodically return to the site to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.
A crawler can index up to a million pages every day and it is creating a copy of your sites table of contents, content, links and references for later use by web searchers.
Search engines that use crawlers: Google, AltaVista, Lycos and Excite.
When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.
One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.
Learn how to start and build your own successful & highly profitable Internet Business in 45 days... 100% Guaranteed! I'm Steven Lohrenz and I can recommend the intern program. Online Business Opportunity
Published July 15th, 2008
Filed in Marketing