Software robots spiders

Five terms all describing basically the same thing, but in this article they'll be referred to collectively as spiders or "agents". A search engine spider is an automated software program used to locate and collect data from web pages for inclusion in a search engine's database and to follow links to find new pages on the World Wide Web.

The term "agent" is more commonly applied to web browsers and mirroring software. If you've ever examined your server logs or web site traffic reports, you've probably come across some weird and wonderful names for search engine spiders, including "Fluffy the Spider" and Slurp.

Depending upon the type of web traffic reports you receive, you may find spiders listed in the "Agents" section of your statistics. Who actually owns these spiders? It's good to know the beneficial from the bad. Some agents are generated by software such as Teleport Pro, an application that allows people to download a full "mirror" of your site onto their hard drives for viewing later on, or sometimes for more insidious purposes such as plagiarism.

If you have a large or image heavy site, the practice of web site stripping could also have a serious impact on your bandwidth usage each month. If you notice entries like Teleport Pro and WebStripper in your traffic reports, someone's been busy attempting to download your web site.

You don't have to just sit back and let this happen. If you are commercially hosted, you'll be able to add a couple of lines to your robots. The robots. These rules are called The Robots Exclusion Standard. To prevent certain agents and spiders from accessing any part of your web site, simply enter the following lines into the robots. Skip a line between entries. You could do the same to exclude search engine spiders, but somehow I don't think you'll really want to do this You can also disallow access by spiders and agents to certain directories e.

Don't use the asterisk in the Disallow statement to indicate "all", use the forward slash instead. Still the reality is that these search engine robots and crawlers have only minimal basic ability to perform tasks. This is very unfortunate that these programmes have neither cutting edge not the incredibly power. These programmes have only limited functionality same as early time web browsers. These robots can read only HTML and texts available on a particular website these crawlers or spiders cannot read images or any flash content.

It is always said that an image worth thousands words but for crawlers it is completely zero, same with flash content however search engines are working hard to improve robots and crawlers functionality, these crawlers judge the importance of image by their tags but these must be relevant it is not a guarantee.

This is not the only restrictions with search engine robots there are many more thing which needed to be improved. Robots or crawlers are restricted to those area which is password protected. Even many programming content are also skipped by spiders. Share on facebook Facebook. Share on twitter Twitter. Share on linkedin LinkedIn. It should be part of any website marketing strategy you opt in for. When a search engine bot arrives at a website, the bots are supposed to check to see if you have a robots.

This file is used to tell robots which areas of your site are off-limits to them. Some bots will ignore these files. However, all search engine bots do look for the file. Every website should have one, even if it is blank. Its just one of the things that the search engines look for. Robots store a list of all the links they find on each page they visit, and follow those links through to other websites. The original concept behind the Internet was that everything would organically be linked together, like a giant relationship model.

This principle is still a code part behind is how robots get around. The smart part behind search engines actually comes in the next step. Compiling all the data that the bots have retrieved is part of building the search engine index, or database. This part of indexing websites and web pages comes from the search engine engineers, who devise the rules and algorithms which are used to evaluate and score the information the search engine bots retrieved. Once the website is added into the search engine database, the information is available for customers who are querying the search engine.

When a search engine user enters a query into a search engine, the search engine performs a variety of steps to ensure that it delivers what it estimates to be the best, most relevant response to the question. When the search engine bot visits a website, it reads all the visible text on the web page, the content of the various tags in the source code title tag, meta tags, Dublin Core Tags, comments tags, alt tags, attribute tags, content, etc.

From the content that it extracts, the search engine decides what the website, and web page is about. There are many factors used to figure out what is of value and what matters. Each search engine has its own set of rules, standards and algorithms in order to evaluate and process the information.