- Inbound Marketing, Search Engine Marketing , SEO
- How Googlebot works, what is Google spider , Googlebot
If the Google ranking factors are partly unknown due to the explicit will of the Mountain View team, fortunately the same cannot be said of the technical functioning of the Googlebot . So let’s see which are the two souls that constitute it and how, together, they contribute to the indexing of the pages of a website.
What is the Google spider?
Before starting, it is appropriate to reiterate what a spider is : in computer language this term – also known by the synonyms of web crawler or robot – indicates a software that “scans” the contents of the database in an automated way on behalf of the search engine .
This means that the Google spider is the search engine’s tool to analyze all the existing web pages online and, subsequently, to give them a ranking.
For this reason it is also called spider, using a metaphor: in fact the spider is known in Nature to move through its web which is woven in a precise but often unpredictable way, passing and passing over the individual filaments to verify its tightness. In the same way, the Google spider moves within the pages of the individual pages, checking their update status.
Leaving aside the zoological metaphors for a moment and focusing on the technical functioning of the spider, it is possible to say that Googlebot is nothing more than a generic term that has been assigned to the two web crawlers of the search engine. A first crawler simulates the user using the desktop device and a second crawler that simulates mobile browsing.
How does Googlebot work?
The purpose of the Googlebot is to perform two main actions:
Crawling : this term identifies in-depth analysis of the web in search of new pages and content;
Indexing : in this regard it is important to differentiate between the actual indexing activity and the positioning activity . In fact, in the first case it indicates the “registration of the existence” of the pages on the search engine, while in the second case the assignment of a score such as to place the pages of the website within the SERP .
For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that these first two steps are followed by a third – not performed by the Googlebot – known as Ranking . On this aspect Martin Splitt , a well-known Googler, has recently clarified that, although this activity is not carried out in practice by the spider, it is nevertheless informed by the bot itself.
In addition to understanding how the Googlebot works, what is important to point out? That your website, even before being user friendly and navigable by smartphone, must be easily analyzed by the spider .
How does the spider get to your website?
According to what has recently been clarified, the Google spider arrives at the page of a particular site through a link on a third page (once again reiterating the importance of Link Building and Digital PR activities).
Alternatively, the bot can arrive at your site because a digital consultant or an SEO technician have entered a SiteMap : this, as the name suggests, is a site map itself that suggests the path to take to the spider itself, facilitating the process. reading of the page database carried out by the spider.
Google Spider Budget (Crawl Budget)
Once the operating mechanisms of the spider have been clarified, one might ask: but how often does the bot pass by my content?
To answer this question we must first of all remember that Google is a company and, as such, assigns a budget to certain activities: this is called the crawl budget .
To optimize this budget, the spider evaluates which pages to scan first: in fact, it does not review them at the same time due to the risk of creating errors or overloads in the system, but on the contrary focuses on those that are considered most interesting for him, i.e. the new ones. .
Among the elements that probably induce the bot to pass from the page of your website is the frequency with which new content is entered: depending on whether the answer is affirmative or not your website, the Googlebot subjects it to more frequent scans to a certain period of time. On the contrary, if it realizes that your site has corrupt pages (that is, in a nutshell, it would take too long to scan for the most disparate reasons) it may even stop passing through them, as happens in the case of penalties.
From what we have been able to understand from this brief review of the functioning of the Google spider, it is evident how important it is for companies that base their business on online sales to have an SEO consultant at their side who can provide valuable suggestions as well as technical executions so that the bot is facilitated in crawling the pages of the site.
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