What Does a Website Crawler See When It Scans Your Site?

Web crawlers are computer programs that are also referred to as robots, bots or spiders. These crawler programs visit websites and record data about each site they scan. A website, for the most part, is merely a list of webpages ranked in order of importance. Web Crawlers can see all of your content listed on your webpage – they don’t have the capacity to distinguish between what you want them to see and not.

Point of Web Crawlers

Web crawlers can be programmed with a lot of different information, depending on who is using it. For example, a search engine provider will scan your site in order to index it for their specific search engine. A website that provides links from one webpage to another may have a crawler that just looks for links and pings them. A link farm can be easily detected by a crawler program, as well as a search engine spider, which is why it is important to not use these if you want your site to be well-respected on the web.

In addition to seeing all of the listed content on your webpage, crawler programs also check for broken links. If a website has broken links, it is bad for their reputation, as well as having the potential to keep users from visiting the site again.

Can You Block a Web Crawler?

If you are attempting to block web crawler bots from visiting your site, there are numerous tricks you can use, but none of them are fool-proof. If you want to block specific websites from accessing your site, the best way is to create a robots.txt file and add each desired website’s name to it. This will have most crawlers ignore your entire website until they see that particular file on the site.

There are several ways you can protect yourself from bot spam, but the best way is to make sure your site has quality content that you are constantly adding. Remember, bots don’t care about your website’s appearance or layout – all they want is to index it for their specific search engine.

SearchSEO Austin is Here to Help Keep Your Site on Track

As long as you have kept up with your website’s maintenance and have great content on it, you don’t have to worry about bot spam. However, it is important to be cautious when entering information into your site. Want to learn more about what these crawlers do and what they see? Call us here at SearchSEO Austin. We would love to help you understand more about them!