Site Crawling
What is Search Engine Crawling? Crawling is the process used by search engine web crawlers (bots or spiders) to visit and download a page and extract its links in order to discover additional pages. Pages known to the search engine are crawled periodically to determine whether any changes have been made to the page’s content since the last time it was crawled. If a search engine detects changes to a page after crawling a page, it will update it’s index in response to these detected changes. How Does Web Crawling Work? Search engines use their own web crawlers to discover and access web pages. All commercial search engine crawlers begin crawling a website by downloading its robots.txt file, which contains rules about what pages search engines should or should not crawl on the website. The robots.txt file may also contain information about sitemaps; this contains lists of URLs that the site wants a search engine crawler to crawl. Search eng...