A search engine crawler is a software program used by search engines to crawl and index web pages on internet. Search engines send these crawlers all over the internet to examine World Wide Web pages. The information about all the web pages is gathered by these crawlers and is stored in search engine data center. A search engine crawler has different names such as robot, spiders, ant etc. SEO experts understand the working of search engine crawlers and then determine a way to get high rank in search engine rankings. Search Engines continuously update their crawler programs to avoid this problem. Search Engines want natural results. They do not want their results to be manipulated by SEO experts. Dealing with crawlers is an important task in search engine optimization. Here we will take up two ways of dealing with crawlers.
i. Robots.txt File:
A “Robots.txt” is a file which is used to inform search engines about which page to be indexed and which page should not be indexed. Robots.txt file is similar to a “No entry” sign board placed in front of a web page for search engine crawlers. Company owners do not want Google to know about their employees name, salary, pricing etc. This file is basically used for privacy matters. A Robots.txt file can be generated with Google Webmasters tools. Then this file is uploaded in the parent directory of the website. Robots.txt file can also be used for unimportant pages that you think are not eligible for indexing. A robots.txt file can also be used for any sub domain of a website.
ii. Rel = “nofollow”:
This technique is used by most of the website owners especially bloggers to restrict search engine crawlers in their own site. If your site has public commenting section, then it is very important to use rel =”nofollow”. Search engine crawlers crawl internet with the help of links. They find their way to other websites with the help of external links. External links are similar to a bridge for crawlers. Many spammers place their links on comments section to steal search engine crawlers from your website. In this way, you lose your page’s hard earned reputation. To avoid this, all you need to do is to insert an attribute of rel=”follow” in the code, similar to:
<a href=”/quality-seo-content-writing-guidelines ” rel=”nofollow”> Read Here</a>
This is an indication to search engine crawlers to not to go to the following link. This is “No Entry” board placed at the start of the bridge.
iii. Robots Meta Tag:
A writer can also make use of Robots Meta Tag which is discussed in the later part of this guide. Controlling search engine crawlers will become easy with few simple codes.
Following the above techniques enables you to deal with search engine crawlers. You can tell search engines which pages and links to crawl and which to not.
Professional SEO content Writing is not an easy task. Various factors have to be considered in this case. We have made the entire process easy for you by providing an easy and resourceful SEO Content Writing Guide For Professionals.
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