How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers
July 17, 2010Most of your prospective customers will find your website through a search engine. Understanding how search engines work and how they find and present information is vital to your long term business success.
Search engines use crawlers or spiders to index websites. When a search engine discovers your website, either through an incoming link or from a submission by you, it will send crawler to catalog all the pages on your site. These crawlers are completely automated. The crawler visits your site, reads the contents, titles, meta tags, links and will also follow links on your site. When it’s finished, the crawler will return the information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed for quick access later. The crawler will index any of the sites you link to as well. Some search engines limit the number of pages per site that are indexed, so if you want everything indexed, keep your site small!
The search engine will send the crawler out to check for new or updated pages periodically. When this happens is determined by the rules of each specific search engine.
A crawler can index up to a million pages every day and it is creating a copy of your sites table of contents, content, links and references for later use by web searchers.
Search engines that use crawlers: Google, AltaVista, Lycos and Excite.
When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.
Search engines use a lot of different ways to determine how to rank a site, some use frequency and location of keywords, but most of them put a special emphasis on the anchor text of incoming links. By determining what words people use to link to your site, it then figures out what your site is about and which search terms to rank it highly for.
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