Some internet surfers still hold on to the mistaken belief that actual people stay each and every website and then input it for inclusion in the search engine’s database. Imagine, if these were right! With billions of websites available on the internet and with a majority of these sites offering fresh content it will take thousands of people to achieve the tasks made by search engine spiders and robots – and even then they won’t be as well-organized or as thorough.Search engine spiders and robots are pieces of code or software that have only one aim – seek content on the internet and within each and every individual web page out there. These tools have a very vital role in how effectively search engines operate.Search engine spiders and robots stay websites and get the necessary information that it needs to determine the nature and content of the website and then adds the data to the search engine’s index. Search engine spiders and robots follow links from one website to a further so that it can consistently and infinitely gather the necessary information. The ultimate goal of search engine spiders and robots is to compile a comprehensive and valuable database that can deliver the most relevant results to the search queries of visitors. But how exactly do search engine spiders and robots work?The total process starts when a web page is sent to a search engine for submission. The submitted URL is added to the queue of websites that will be visited by the search engine spider. Submissions can be optional though because most spiders will be able to find the content in a web page if other websites link to the page. This is the reason why it is a excellent thought to build reciprocal links with other website. By enhancing the link popularity of your website and getting links from other sites that have the same topic as your website. When the search engine spider robot visits the website, it checks if there is an existing robots.txt file. The file tells the robot which areas of the site are off limits to its probe – like certain directories that have no use for search engines. All search engine bots look for this text file so it is a excellent thought to place one even if it is blank.The robots list and store all of the links found on a page and they follow each link to its destination website or page. The robots then submit all of this information to the search engine, which in turn compiles the data expected from all the bots and builds the search engine database. This part of the process by now has the intervention of search engine engineers who write the algorithms employed in evaluating and scoring the information that the search engine bots compiled. The moment all of the information is added to the search engine database this information is by now made available to search engine visitors who are making search queries in the search engine.
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Posts Tagged ‘robots’
How exactly do search engine spiders & robots work
Friday, January 1st, 2010Five Easy to Make Mistakes That Keep Search Engine Robots Away From Your Website
Thursday, December 31st, 2009Search engine robots are very simple software programs. If an indexing robot cannot find the content of your website immediately, it will skip your site and go to the next link in the list. For that reason, it is very vital to make sure that search engine robots can index your web pages without problems.
Here are the top 5 elements that drive search engine robots away:
Reason 1: Your robots.txt file is hurt or it contains a typo
If search engine robots misinterpret your robots.txt file, they might completely ignore your web pages.
Dual check your robots.txt file and make sure that you use the disallow parameter only for web pages that you really don’t want to have indexed.
Reason 2: Your URLs contain too many variables
URLs with many variables can produce problems with search engine robots. If your URLs contain too many variables, search engine robots might ignore your pages.
Here’s Google’s official statement about web pages with many variables:
“Google indexes dynamically generated webpages, including .asp pages, .php pages, and pages with question marks in their URLs. But, these pages can produce problems for our crawler and may be ignored.”
Reason 3: You use session IDs in your URLs
Many search engines don’t index URLs that contain session IDs because they can lead to duplicate content problems. If possible, avoid session IDs in your URLs. Better use cookies to store session IDs.
Reason 4: Your web pages contain too much code
Of course, your web pages can contain JavaScript code, CSS code and other script code that is not frankly related to your content. Stay your website with a web browser and select “View source” or “View HTML source”.
If it is hard for you to spot the actual content of your website then search engines might also have difficulty to parse your pages.
Reason 5: Your website navigation causes problems
Fancy JavaScript or DHTML menus cannot be parsed by most search engine robots. Flash or AJAX menus are even worse when it comes to website navigation.
As mentioned above, search engine robots are very simple programs. They can follow HTML links, all other links can produce problems.
Optimized web page content and excellent inbound links are crucial for high search engine rankings. But, the best content and the best links won’t help you much if search engines cannot index your pages.
Make sure that search engine spiders can index your web pages without problems so that your web pages can get the rankings they deserve.
Warmly,
Gary Neame
How To Keep Robots Out Of Your Web Site
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009THE ROBOTS.TXT FILE
You know that search engines have been produced to help people find information quickly on the Internet, and the search engines buy much of their information through robots (also known as spiders or crawlers), that look for web pages for them.
The spiders or crawlers robots explore the web looking for and recording all kinds of information. They usually start with URL submitted by users, or from links they find on the web sites, the sitemap files or the top amount of a site.
Once the robot accesses the home page then recursively accesses all pages linked from that page. But the robot can also check out all the pages that can find on a particular server.
After the robot finds a web page it works indexing the title, the keywords, the text, etc. But sometimes you might want to prevent search engines from indexing some of your web pages like news postings, and specially marked web pages (in example: affiliate´s pages), but whether individual robots comply to these conventions is pure voluntary.
ROBOTS EXCLUSION PROTOCOL
So if you want robots to keep out from some of your web pages, you can question robots to ignore the web pages that you don´t want indexed, and to do that you can place a robots.txt file on the local root server of your web site.
In example if you have a directory called e-books and you want to question robots to keep out of it, your robots.txt file should read:
User-agent: * Disallow: e-books/
When you don´t have enough control over your server to set up a robots.txt file, you can try count a META tag to the head section of any HTML document.
In example, a tag like the following tells robots not to index and not to follow links on a particular page:
meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”
Support for the META tag among robots is not so frequent as the Robots Exclusion Protocol, but most of major web indexes currently support it.
NEWS POSTINGS
If you want to keep the search engines out of your news postings, you can make an an “X-no-archive” line in of your postings’ headers:
X-no-archive: yes
But even if common news clients allow you to add an X-no-archive line to the headers of your news postings, some of them don´t permit you to do so.
The problem is that most search engines assume that all information they find is public unless marked otherwise.
So be careful because though the robot and archive exclusion standards may help keep your material out of major search engines there are some others that respect no such rules.
If you’re highly concerned about the privacy of your e-mail and Usenet postings, you must use some anonymous remailers and PGP. You can read about it here:
www dot well dot com/user/abacard/remail.html
www dot io dot com/~combs/htmls/crypto.html
world dot std dot com/~franl/pgp/
Even if you are not particularly concerned about privacy, remember that anything you write will be indexed and archived somewhere for eternity, so use the robots.txt file as much as you need it.
Written by Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi
3 Tips For Fully Utilizing Your Robots TXT File
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009When it comes to administering the back-end part of your website, especially if this is a sales site that you are going to use to promote a product to make cash, one of the vital bits and pieces that should be included in your server files and in the meta data of your web pages is called the “robots.txt” file. Depending on the type of website you have and the purpose that it serves for you, the information that you include in your robots file is of varying importance. When you are first setting up your website, this is only a touch that you need to do once place it can have vital benefits months and years into the future.
The purpose of the “robots.txt” file is to instruct search engine web bots or spiders as to which content should be indexed and which content should be avoided. There are three vital tips that can help you to gain the maximum benefits from using this file in the right way on your server.
Protect Your Files, Software, And Documents
Many online businesses have a business model based on the digital delivery of a product, whether that product is a piece of software or an ebook that contains certain vital information that the buyer needs. Software piracy is a major concern for this type of business model, and unfortunately with an ebook product it is much simpler to hurt your business because your documents can be stored in a search engine reasonably easily. By instructing web bots not to catalog certain material you can help to make sure that these files or software remain confidential.
Keep Others From Infringing Your Copyrighted Material
Many types of websites such as a photography website, a stock photo marketplace, a premium desktop wallpaper site or any other type of site that is largely graphics-intensive might have a large images folder which you would not want to be stored in the memory of any search engines. You may also have articles or documents that you sell to provide a solution to a given problem, or maybe you simply do not want other authors out there to copy your articles word-for-word. By including a statement in your “robots.txt” file that says “Disallow: /folder/” where you insert the name of the folder where your material is stored you can prevent search engine spiders from indexing any of this content.
Prevent Web Bots From Utilizing Excessive Bandwidth
If you have a large website then there is a chance that your images folder could have as many as thousands of different images which could take up gigabytes of space. If a search engine spider stumbles upon this folder it could potentially lead to an unwanted increase in server bandwidth. Taking steps to prevent this from happening by instructing web bots to ignore your images folder or other folders containing large files could make sure that you do not receive higher website hosting invoices due to increased bandwidth.
It is vital to remember that while most search engine spiders are programmed to honor the data that is presented in the robots file, do not fully assume that all of the files and archives on your site will never be indexed or copied simply because this file says that they shouldn’t be. A computer programmer that does not have your best interest at heart can program a web bot to simply store all information and files it finds into its own cache memory, and if you are running a website where you sell a digital product then this could potentially harm your business because once your documents are copied they can then be distributed or catalogued in the search engines.
How to prevent duplicate content with effective use of the robots.txt and robots tag.
Saturday, December 26th, 2009Duplicate content is one of the problems that we evenly come
across as part of the search engine optimization air force we
place forward. If the search engines determine your site contains
similar content, this may result in penalties and even exclusion
from the search engines. Fortunately it’s a problem that is
easily rectified.
Your primary weapon of choice against duplicate content can be
found within “The Robot Exclusion Protocol” which has now been
adopted by all the major search engines.
There are two ways to control how the search engine spiders
index your site. 1. The Robot Exclusion File or “robots.txt” and
2. The Robots Tag
The Robots Exclusion File (Robots.txt)
This is a simple text file that can be produced in Notepad. Once
produced you must upload the file into the root directory of your
website e.g. www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. Previous to a search
engine spider indexes your website they look for this file which
tells them exactly how to index your site’s content.
The use of the robots.txt file is most suited to static html
sites or for excluding certain files in dynamic sites. If the
majority of your site is dynamically produced then consider using
the Robots Tag.
Making your robots.txt file
Example 1 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search
engine spiders and make the entire site available for indexing.
The robots.txt file would look like this:
User-agent: * Disallow:
Explanation The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means
this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. By
leaving the “Disallow” blank all parts of the site are suitable
for indexing.
Example 2 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search
engine spiders and to stop the spiders from indexing the faq,
cgi-bin the images directories and a specific page called
faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt
file would look like this:
User-agent: * Disallow: /faq/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow:
/images/ Disallow: /faqs.html
Explanation The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means
this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders.
Preventing access to the directories is achieved by naming them,
and the specific page is referenced frankly. The named files &
directories will now not be indexed by any search engine
spiders.
Example 3 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to the Google
spider, googlebot and stop it from indexing the faq, cgi-bin,
images directories and a specific html page called faqs.html
contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would
look like this:
User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /faq/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /faqs.html
Explanation By naming the particular search spider in the
“User-agent” you prevent it from indexing the content you
specify. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by
simply naming them, and the specific page is referenced
frankly. The named files & directories will not be indexed by
Google.
That’s all there is to it!
As mentioned earlier the robots.txt file can be hard to
implement in the case of dynamic sites and in this case it’s
probably necessary to use a combination of the robots.txt and
the robots tag.
The Robots Tag
This alternative way of telling the search engines what to do
with site content appears in the
In this example we are telling all search engines not to index
the page or to follow any of the links contained within the
page.
In this second example I don’t want Google to cache the page,
because the site contains time sensitive information. This can
be achieved simply by count the “noarchive” directive.
What could be simpler!
Even if there are other ways of preventing duplicate content
from appearing in the Search Engines this is the simplest to
implement and all websites should operate either a robots.txt
file and or a Robot tag combination.
Should you require further information about our search engine
marketing or optimization air force please stay us at
www.e-prominence.co.uk – The search marketing company