Support Home

Web Hosting Tutorials

Web Hosting Questions

Network Status

[SEARCH ENGINE SUBMISSION] What is a search engine spider or crawler?

A "spider" is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a "crawler" or a "bot." Spiders are typically programmed to visit sites that have been submitted by their owners as new or updated. Entire sites or specific pages can be selectively visited and indexed. Spiders are called spiders because they usually visit many sites in parallel at the same time, their "legs" spanning a large area of the "web." Spiders can crawl through a site's pages in several ways. One way is to follow all the hypertext links in each page until all the pages have been read. Its job is to look at a variety of things. But it always looks at your Meta tags and keywords, so it's a good idea to review your keywords and experiment with them every couple of months.

Related Articles:

  [ALERTS] How do I setup Alerts?
  [ALERTS] How do I add an event to my Alerts calendar?
  [ALERTS] How do I change my contact information for Alerts?
  [ALERTS] How do I view my Alert Event History?
  [ALERTS] What are Alerts?