Do search engines see IP Traffic? On-demand content?

oneillgraphics · #1 (**permalink**) 05-06-2005, 11:07 AM

Hi Guys & Gals,
I need some help understanding how search engines quarry information in forums. I’ve heard and read several theories about this form “strictly content” to “IP traffic”. Most of the forms that I’ve been researching are on-demand content so I’m missing something here. Please help.

Does the search engines see IP traffic? (If so how is this being done?) If content is driving the results then how is the engine finding content that’s buried in php files and DB’s?

Feel free to ref other posts. I've not found much pertaining to this question though.

-- Brian

**brian.mark** · #2 (**permalink**) 05-10-2005, 05:39 PM

I think what you're really asking about is spiders, not search engines.

Spiders will start at whatever page they get directed in on, then crawl all of the links they find form that page on. They don't care if the page is ASP, PHP, CGI, JSP, or HTML. At some point, they figure out what pages are updated more frequently and start there.

This means that any page that you can click to via an HTML link can be found by a spider, provided it isn't stopped by robots.txt files. Forums won't create a problem because they can crawl all the links and get to all of the pages in most cases, such as this forum. It may take them a while because of how many pages a forum normally has, but more IBL's will make that process faster.

Brian.

oneillgraphics · #3 (**permalink**) 05-11-2005, 07:44 PM

Thanks Brian,
So is there anything in the process of searching/spidering content that gages how much IP traffic a site is generating. Basically dose google know that between sites A and B (all things being equal in content / links and so forth) that site B has much higher traffic (IP traffic) so it's a more relevant site?

**brian.mark** · #4 (**permalink**) 05-12-2005, 01:29 AM

Google can't see how much traffic a site has. They can guess based upon how many people they refer to a site, but they can't figure out what traffic other engines send that same site, nor what traffic that site gets normally (bookmarks, people typing the URL, etc.)

They can make best guesses, but it wouldn't make any sense to factor that into SERPs as a popular page doesn't mean it fits the query.

Brian.