What is a Web Crawler?, How it Works and How Important it is for Websites

Did you know that there is a program called a Web Crawler whose role and responsibility is to browse and collect all the data that appears on your browser when you use search engines to find information on the internet?

Although the existence of this web crawler is rarely known to the public, there are actually a lot of benefits that you can get from this web crawler, especially for those of you who are trying to increase the traffic and visibility of your website.

Understanding Web Crawlers

Also known as web spiders, a web crawler is a program or bot that is used by many search engines to search and collect data on the internet.

The website content obtained will be analyzed and the information obtained will be stored by the Crawler in the search engine database. The process of Crawler browsing the content is called as Crawling while the process of storing the information is called indexing.

When you later search for information via the internet, the search engine that you usually use will find the most relevant information from its database and display it in your search result browser.

The interesting fact is that the web crawler for each search engine is different. Below are examples of Crawlers from the most popular search engines today:

1. GoogleBot, is used to index and store website content in Google's database.

2. Bingbot, is a crawler that Microsoft launched in 2010 to store data in the database of the search engine Bing.

3. DuckDuckBot, is a crawler used by the search engine DuckDuckGo to search and store data.

4. Baiduspider, is a bot used by Baidu, one of the most popular search engines in China.

5. AlexaCrawler, a web crawler that Amazon uses to determine Alexa's internet ranking.

6. YandexBot, emerged from the largest search engine in Russia called Yandex.

7. Slurp Bot, is used by Yahoo to index and display website content in Yahoo search engine mobile search results.

Your website requires a special method to get into the database of each search engine because the web crawler of each search engine is different. But, because Google is the largest search engine today, it's better if you optimize your website content according to the provisions of Google Bot.

How Web Crawlers Work

It is impossible for search engines to find relevant information among the many websites and data spread on the internet without the help of a web crawler. Web Crawlers or web spiders will be sent by search engines to crawl and look for new content on the internet.

Image Source: https://medium.com/@suchanachakraborty/making-web-crawler-and-scraper-the-easy-way-1a5f93fcb462

Various content that can be searched, for example web pages, images, videos, links and so on. The list of URLs that web Crawlers get from previous Crawling activities and sitemaps of a website is the initial process of starting Crawling. A sitemap is a collection of web pages that have been published and can be accessed by users and search engines. Through these sitemaps, web crawlers can make the crawling process faster and more structured.

Then, based on the collection of website pages, the web crawler will crawl to other links on your website sitemap. This process will continue to repeat on the next link and will continue to run non-stop unless there is a problem with the sitemap and the website.

Then, what if your website has never been indexed in search engine databases? Relax, you can also ask the web crawler to index your latest content manually using the Google search console.

Indexing Is Very Important For Websites

An indexed website is very important to increase sales of a business on search engines. If a website is not indexed, then the website you are looking for will not be displayed in search engines. It will not be displayed on any page in a google search, even if you search for the website with detailed keywords.

When you first have a website, it is very important to register it on a search engine service such as Google Search Console. The sooner you register, the faster your website can be indexed in search engines. Although in some cases you do not need to register a website to be indexed in search engines. But this of course takes more time.

The faster the better. If it is not visible in search engines, then no one will see the product that you offer. Website crawling and indexing is the main thing, because every time there are millions of people who are looking for information on search engines.

SEO and Web Crawlers

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is a way or method for optimizing content on search engines. SEO is the stage after your website is indexed and can be searched on search engines. When your website is indexed on Google or any search engine. Your website will fight with many other websites to fight over the first page of Google search. When you are indexed for the first time, of course your website is not in the first place. So this is where the role of SEO is needed.

Implementing SEO optimally will boost your website's ranking in search engines. The better it is, the easier it is for your website to be found. Netizens don't need to look for your website on the next page, and this is very beneficial for your website and business going forward.

Ok, that's our article this time about what a web crawler is, how it works and how important it is for websites. May be useful. If there is something you want to discuss, please ask directly in the comments column below. That is all and thank you.