I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t describe myself as a “technical” person. In fact, for most people, the technical aspects of marketing are the hardest to master. For example, when it comes to technical SEO, it can be difficult to understand how the process works.
But it is important to gain as much knowledge as possible in order to be able to do our job more effectively. All this said, let's understand what web crawlers are and how they work.
You may be wondering: Who runs these web crawlers? At Roas Hunter , we explain it to you.
Well, these web crawlers are operated by search engines with their own algorithms. This algorithm tells the web crawler how to crawl relevant information that answers your question.
A web crawler crawls and categorizes all the web pages on the Internet that it can find, and organizes them into an index.
This means that you can tell the web crawler not to find your website if you don't want it to appear in certain search engines. To do this, you would need to upload a robots.txt file . Essentially, what this file does is tell the search engine how to crawl and sort the pages on your website in the results.
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So how does a crawler do all this?
A web crawler works by finding URLs, reviewing architecture email lists them and categorizing web pages, and then adding hyperlinks to any web page to make a list of pages to display. Despite this, crawlers are intelligent and determine the importance of each web page.
This means that a search engine's web crawler will most likely not crawl the entire Internet. Instead, it will decide the importance of each web page based on factors including how many websites link to that page, visits to the page, and even brand authority.
Therefore, a web crawler will determine which pages to crawl, in what order to crawl them, and how often to crawl them for updates.
For example, if you have a new web page, or there have been changes to an existing page, then the crawler notes this and updates the index.
Interestingly, if you have a new website, you can ask search engines to crawl your page.
When the web crawler finds your page, it looks at the tags, saves that information, and puts it into an index for Google to sort by keywords.
Before this whole process starts on your page, the crawler will specifically look at the robots.txt file to see which pages to crawl, which is important for technical SEO.
Ultimately, when a web crawler crawls your page, it decides whether your page should be shown in search results for what each user is specifically searching for. This means that if you want to increase organic traffic, it's important to understand this process.
It's interesting to note that all web crawlers behave differently. For example, they may use different factors when deciding which web pages are most important to crawl.
If the technical side of this is confusing, that's understandable. That's why HubSpot has a web optimization course that puts technical topics into more understandable language and teaches you how to implement your own solutions or discuss them with a web expert.
In simple terms, web crawlers are responsible for finding and sorting online content for search engines. They work by organizing and filtering web pages so that search engines understand what each page is about.