How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

By Silvi Pasricha

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders. Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required SEO Copywriting and other linking for the promotion, etc (submission page), the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider' is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don't create a site with 500 pages!

How does a spider act?

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: AltaVista and Google.

Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

How SEO Copywriting supports in satisfying crawlers?

SEO Copywriting provides the appropriate keywords which the crawlers are looking for. But one of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page