How Do Search Engine Robots Work

We are always in the hurry to get higher positions on the search engine result pages (SERPs) and better page rank for our web pages. But do we really mind how our sites are ranked or indexed? What is the method or the process behind? Do we care for search engine robots that work behind the results and the ranking of our site?

It is not that people SEOs or the webmasters are ignorant of work procedure of search engine robots. But the intention is here to put forth a few points that can clarify and say how robots work; rather how those typically programmed applications are the deciding factors for success of your websites. At the same time neglecting their working procedure can be effective for us. Let us know in simple terms the work procedure of the search engine robots:

• First we either have to submit our sites to the search engines or build up relation with our business related sites which will put our links in their sites. Either of the process or the both are the invitations to the search engine robot to visit our site.
• The search engine robots regularly wander throughout the millions of the web pages in the World Wide Web. Finding the new submission or the links through other sites, they start crawling websites and collect information.
• Before gathering information they search engine robots find robot.txt file which is an instruction for them about which pages to crawl and which are restricted. If the file is not available or wrongly commented about the restricted pages, site remains without crawl or any confidential page may get to public.
• Search engine robots visit from one link to other in web pages of a site. If pages are far from the main page or home page, or any link is broken, collection process is stopped or avoided. This is a reason for orphan page never comes in search result. Site map helps robots nicely.
• Sometimes we find images are not crawled and not found in the image search. This is also for misguidance to search engine robots. This results for the wrong image tags, path is not properly keyword-rich or alt tag is missing, the crawlers cannot fetch the data properly and the images may not come in the image search.
• It is found that search engine robots are not indexing a website. There may be simple reasons. In the sites there may be flash, JavaScript or faulty HTML coding that are preventing the robots to crawl the pages. So it is better to put the JavaScript files below the page so that robots read the entire essential files first then come to JavaScript.
• Fetching the information from any page, robots submit those to search engine databases. Then some special algorithm is applied (varies for different engines) and results are shown for the pages.
• Many times we see our new updates are not available in the search results page. This is because robots visit as per scheduled by the engines. If for huge traffic or technical fault sites go down (may be bandwidth exceeds), robots visit later and we get update later.

These were the simple yet nice processes through which search engine robots work and we get our sites coming properly in the good positions of the SERPs. Finally we can say - it is important that robots come regularly to visit our sites. On the basis of their collected information search engines rank our sites matching with their particular algorithm. If robots do not find our optimizations efforts (both on-page and off-page) or stop visits, our entire endeavor goes in vain. Even the site may vanish from SERPs.

Finally we may say that we run behind better position in the search engine results page. We optimize our sites to get attention of the search engines, but do we clearly keep the idea how search engines index our pages? Search engine robots are the messenger of the search engines about our web pages. Clear conception about the work of the robot help us in getting better results. So whether you are offering the search engine optimization work to a web design company that develops the websites or to a specialist SEO do not hesitate to ask if they have the proper knowledge on how the search engine robots work! Without this knowledge no SEO effort will be successful!