What is a Search Engine Spider?

A search engine spider is a software crawler that is also referred to as a search engine bot or simply a bot. Search engine spiders indicate data marketers, HTML, broken links, orphan pages, important key terms that indicate a page’s topics, traffic coming to the site or individual pages and more. Spiders understand how pages and sites are constructed and also, how they’re tied to other sites or internal pages. All of this information is used to help search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing determine where pages should be ranked in the SERPs (search engine results pages.)

How Does a Search Engine Spider Work?

Spiders understand how pages and sites are constructed and also, how they’re tied to other sites or internal pages. All of this information is used to help search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing determine where pages should be ranked in the SERPs (search engine results pages.)

Specific coding is used to tell search engine spiders more about a page. For example, schema markup is used to tell spiders exactly what a page is about. If your company is a hotel or airline, you can use schema to tell search engine spiders that you are a hotel, what accommodations you offer, the rooms you have available and more. You can read more about schema markup here.

When a bot crawls your site and it finds schema markup, sitemaps, robots.txt protocol, noindex, etc., it will detect this information and update its index to continue crawling in order to better understand your site.

What are the Different Search Engine Spiders?

Some of the most important search engine spiders you should know about include the following:

  1. GoogleBot - Google
  2. Bingbot - Bing
  3. Slurp bot – Yahoo
  4. DuckDuckBot – DuckDuckGo
  5. Baiduspider – for the Chinese search engine Baidu
  6. Yandex Bot – for the Russian search engine Yandex

What Can Search Engine Spiders See?

Spiders can see all of the technical coding and messages written in your HTML for them. They can also see all new and updated content on your site. This can include blogs, articles, glossary pages, videos, images, PDF files, etc.

What is Crawl Budget?

Google uses a crawl budget to determine how much of your website’s content to crawl and when. Search engine giant, Google, determines a site’s crawl budget based on how often and how fast their spider can crawl your site without hurting your server and the popularity of your site. This includes the freshness and relevancy of your content as well.

Gary Illyes from Google says that crawl budget should not be a main priority for sites and sites with a large volume of pages should use crawl budget as a consideration.

What Could Prevent Spiders from Seeing all of Your Site?

Some common mistakes developers make throughout a site that could keep search engine spiders from seeing your entire site include the following:

  1. Disallowing search engines from crawling your website. You can do this if you don’t want search engines bots to crawl your site but if you do want them to crawl it again at some point, be sure to remove coding that tells them to avoid crawling.
  2. Placing navigation in JavaScript rather than HTML. If you place navigation types in your JavaScript, you should also place them in your HTML as search engine spiders don’t fully understand JavaScript yet.
  3. Having orphan pages could prevent spiders from crawling all of your pages. Be sure to link important pages throughout one another internally to create a path for search spiders.