SEO For Beginners: What Are Web Crawlers, How it Works on Search Engine and its Roles

Sophie Webster, Tech Times 09 July 2021, 08:07 pm

Web crawlers may be a familiar term, but not everyone knows what it means. Basically, web crawlers search the web and index it so that when you look for something on search engines like Google or Bing, you can find them easily.

Web Crawlers and Search Engines

When you look for something online using a keyword, the search engine goes through trillions of pages to create a list of results that are related to your keyword, according to CloudFlare.

So how do these search engines have all of the pages on file and know how to sort them within seconds?

The answer to that is web crawlers. Web crawlers are automated programs that browse through the web to add pages on search engines-these robots index websites to build a list of pages that will appear in your search results.

Also Read: Edward Snowden used web crawler software to dig into NSA files

Web crawlers also create and store copies of the pages in the engine's database, which allows you to search for pages in seconds. It is also the reason why search engines usually include the cached versions of sites in their own databases.

Web Crawlers Selection

Web crawlers can pick the websites to crawl into because website owners allow them to do so. They can achieve this by requesting search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, or Google to index their pages, according to WebFx.

The process depends on the search engine that is used. Also, search engines usually select popular and well-linked websites to crawl by tracking the number of times that the URL is linked on other websites.

Website owners can also use certain processes to help search engines index their websites, according to How to Geek.

For example, they can upload a site map. It is a file that contains all of the links and pages that are part of your website. It is used to indicate what pages you would like indexed.

Once search engines have crawled a website once, they will crawl that site again. The frequency will depend on how popular the website is.

Therefore, site owners keep updated site maps to let engines know which websites they would need to index.

Importance of Meta Tags

Under the URL and title of each search result in Google, you will see a short description of the page. The descriptions are called snippets, and they don't always line up with the website's actual content.

This is because many websites have meta tags, which are custom descriptions that site owners add to their pages.

The site owners usually come up with enticing metadata descriptions written to make people want to click on a website.

Google also lists other meta-information, like stock availability and prices. This is very useful for those who are running e-commerce websites.

Web searching is an important part of using the internet. Searching the web is a great way to learn about now websites, communities, and threads.

Web crawlers visit millions of pages every day and add them to the search engines. While web crawlers have their downsides, like taking up resources, they are valuable to both the site owners and visitors.