What Is a Web Crawler or Web Spider?

In order to enhance our websites and attract a wider audience, it’s critical that we learn as much as we can. The web crawler is one instrument that is crucial to search engine optimization. So, we’ll discover what web crawlers are in this blog, how they work, and why they ought to visit your website.

What Is a Web Crawler?

A web crawler, commonly referred to as a web spider, is a bot that browses and catalogs online content. In essence, web crawlers are in charge of comprehending the information on a web page so they can extract it in response to a query.

Who controls these web crawlers, you may be thinking. Typically, search engines run web crawlers using their own algorithms. In order to identify relevant data in answer to a search query, the algorithm will instruct the web crawler on how to do so.

All online pages on the internet that a web spider can find and is instructed to index will be searched (crawled) and categorized. So, if you don’t want your website to be noticed by search engines, you can tell a web crawler not to crawl it.

An upload of a robots.txt file is required for this. A robots.txt file essentially instructs a search engine how to crawl and index the pages on your website.

How Do Web Crawlers Work?

A web crawler finds URLs, then reads, analyzes, and categorizes web pages. They discover links to other websites along the route and add those to the list of pages to crawl next. Because they are intelligent, web crawlers can judge the significance of each web page.

Most likely, a search engine’s web crawler won’t search the entire internet. Instead, it will evaluate each web page’s significance based on metrics such as the number of pages that link to it, page views, and even brand authority. A web crawler will choose which pages to crawl, in what order, and how frequently to check for updates.

The web crawler will take note and update the index, for instance, if you add a new web page or make modifications to an existing one. You can also ask search engines to crawl your website if it has a new web page.

When a web crawler visits your page, it reads the copy and meta descriptions, and stores and indexes that data for Google to search for keywords.

It is crucial for technical SEO since the web crawler will check your robots.txt file before beginning the entire process to determine which pages to crawl.

In the end, a web crawler that visits your page determines whether it will appear on a search query’s results page. It’s vital to remember that different web crawlers may operate in different ways. For instance, when determining which web pages are the most crucial to crawl, some people may use various considerations.

After explaining how web crawlers work, let’s talk about why they should visit your website.

Why Is Website Crawling Important for Google?

Your website must be indexed in order to be found in search results. You won’t be able to find your website without a web crawler, even if you search for more than one paragraph that was extracted straight from your website.

Simply said, unless your website has been crawled once, it cannot be found naturally. Give your site the capacity to reach the audience it’s intended for by having it crawled _ especially if you want to enhance your organic traffic _ in order to uncover and discover links on the internet across search engines.

How and Why Web Crawlers Crawl Your Site?

Your website may rank lower in SERPs if web crawlers find it difficult to crawl because of problems. You put a lot of effort into your company and content, but as was already discussed, if people can’t find your website online, they won’t know how fantastic it is.

Crawling tools like Screaming Frog and DeepCrawl, fortunately, can reveal information about the health of your website. Using a crawling tool to conduct a site audit  can assist you in finding frequent mistakes and locating problems like:

• Broken Links: Links that point to pages that are no longer in existence not only give users a bad experience, but they can also lower your SERP ranks.
• Material Duplication: When content is duplicated over many URLs, it is challenging for Google (or other search engines) to determine which version is most pertinent to a user’s search query. Utilizing 301 redirects to merge them is one approach for fixing issues.
• Page Title: Title tags that are too long, too short, duplicated, or missing can all affect how well your page gets ranked.

Note: If you don’t know what the issues are, you can’t fix them on your website. Using web crawling technology eliminates the uncertainty involved in assessing your site.