What is a Googlebot?

Have you heard of Google bots? No, it’s not a little robot, like Wall-E. Google bots are actually just computer programmes that crawl web pages a bit like spiders. If you’ve heard the term but are unsure as to how it relates to your website, here’s a little more information:

Crawler?

Whether you’ve heard the term Googlebot, spider or web crawler, they all relate to the same thing. Googlebot is a programme that crawls the web via links. It looks at new content and suggests what needs to be added to the index. The index being Google’s brain! These crawlers travel to all corners of the internet to look for pages and see what’s on them. Of course, this is just Google’s version and other search engines will have their equivalent bots or crawlers.

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How do they work?

The bots use databases and sitemaps found during previous searches to work out where they need to look next. When it finds new links on a site, it adds them to its list of where to look next. It also works out how often it needs to crawl sites. If you want your site to be indexed correctly, you must keep an eye on its ‘crawlability’.

Different crawlers

There are different bots to search for different things. For example, Adbots look for the quality of ads, while mobile bots and image bots look at the quality of those things. Why not consider speaking to web designers in Reading for professional advice?

Do they visit your site?

You can check your site to see if it has been visited recently. Look into your log files or open the Crawl section in the Google Search Console. The Search Console is a great place to look to check the crawlability of your website. Any errors that were picked up by the bots will be listed here for you to sort out. You can also ask Google to recrawl your site.

How to optimise for bots

If you want to allow Google bots to access your site quickly, you need to remove any technical barriers that might be preventing the crawler from properly accessing it. It’s a rather complicated process for which you should probably get help from a web developer. For web design in Reading go to Star Web Innovations. It’s really important to allow Google to access your site because if it can’t crawl your site, it won’t rank it well either.

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To wrap it up

So, in conclusion, when you hear people talking about bots, you don’t have to worry about a scary robot invasion. These are the cyber programmes that crawl around looking at information on web pages. If your site is technically sound, you’ll get visited often and if you regularly update and add new content, it will visit more often. And remember, if you make any significant changes to your site, you can ask it call round straight away, so the changes will quickly be reflected in the search results.