Search Engine’s Web Crawlers: its importance to web rankings

Ever wonder how search engines rank your sites? What these engines do to determine how popular your site is, especially the crawler-based search engines? Crawler-based search engines have what they call a “web crawler”, and that will answer if not all, most questions lurking in your mind.

What is then web crawler? How does web crawlers work? What does it do or what is its purpose? Well, a web crawler is a simple, automated program or script that “crawls” or scans throughout the internet pages. Some call this crawler, automatic indexer, web spider, web robot or bot. This leaves traces in your access logs, which means that, if you know what to look for, you will know too that a spider has visited your web site.

You can also tell what it has or has not recorded. This unmanned program is operated by search engines. And how does this works? The web crawler visits each Web site and, each and every pages of your site. This then reads the visible texts, hyperlinks and contents of the tags used. In short, it reads all the contents of the site’s page and the pages of your site. It then determines, using the keywords gathered, what the web page is about. Then records all the words and notes each links to other sites.

The web crawler indexes the information and stores the web site into the main database of the search engine it’s working for. And from there, the web page will then be included in the page ranking process. A web crawler is programmed to follow web links from one web page to another, and from one website to another. The more links this web crawler finds in you site, the more they will visit your site for indexing.

These web crawlers are important for it serves many purposes. Linguists use web crawlers. They use web crawlers to perform textual analysis by determining the words that are commonly used now a days. Market researchers may also use web crawlers in order to determine and to assess the trend in a certain market. This just means that web crawlers can be used by anyone who are collecting information on the internet. But the web crawlers’ most common purpose is associated with search engines.

These search engines use web crawlers to collect information from web pages for them to quickly provide the internet users or surfers with websites that are related with the keywords they [meaning, the internet surfers] have inputted in their website. This web crawler is your most important visitor. If you allow these to have an easy access to your site and make it easy for these crawlers to go around your site, then you will have more points, which also mean higher search engine rankings. Search engines use web crawlers to collect data and to keep up with the rapid internet change and expansion. These help search engines in keeping their databases up to date.

But recently, many search engines index only up to a certain number of pages, often it indexes at about 400 pages, then it stops. This is due to the rapid expansion of the world wide web. It has become impossible to index everything. We cannot really determine up to how many pages the web crawler will index. It is therefore important for web developers to submit each page of the site that you want to be indexed, especially those pages that contains important information, hyperlinks or keywords. This just means, web crawlers are very important for web developers too. Through these, search engines will know the sites that you linked to and the sites that are linked to you. The number of links to your site indicates popularity, which will then boosts your ranking.