Spiders make great geek pets, at least virtual ones do. Here at StepForth, we keep a couple spiders on our system to test sites, pages and documents in the hopes of learning more about the behaviours of common search engine spiders such as GoogleBot, Yahoo’s Slurp and MSNBot.
Playing in Googlebot’s Sandbox with Slurp, Teoma & MSNbot Spiders Display Distinctly Differing Personalities
There has been endless webmaster speculation and worry about the so-called “Google Sandbox” – the indexing time delay for new domain names – rumored to last for at least 45 days from the date of first “discovery” by Googlebot. This recognized listing delay came to be called the “Google Sandbox effect.”
Supplementing Spiders
We, as webmasters or website owners, are always looking for ways to supplement the search engine spiders. I call it ‘supplementing spiders’.
Got Spiders?
Many internet marketers blow mountains of start-up cash on their websites just trying to break into search engine rankings. I was one of these internet marketers.
How Deep into Your Site Are the Spiders Crawling?
Have you ever wondered how far down into your site the search engine spiders are going? Are the pay inclusion spiders coming at regular intervals like they’re supposed to?
Stopping and Directing Web Spiders
Not all agents, (otherwise known as crawlers, bots, robots and spiders), that visit your site will be of benefit. Even the “good” spiders such as the ones Google sends out to index your site may visit places that you don’t wish them to.
Controlling Search Engine Spiders
Sometimes you have pages on your website that you don’t want the search engines to see – maybe they’re not optimized yet, or maybe they’re not quite relevant to your site’s theme. In other cases, you want to get rid of some annoying search robot that’s cluttering up your logs. Whatever your reason is for wanting to keep the spiders under control, the best way to do so, by far, is to use a “robots.txt” file on your website. Robots.txt is a simple text file that you upload to the root directory of your website. Spiders read this file first, and process it, before they crawl your site. The simplest robots.txt file possible is this:
Spam-Proofing Your Website and Doing Away With Unwanted Spiders
Almost every website operator wants search engine spiders to visit. After all, search engines are the best source of free traffic on the web. In the event that you don’t want them to visit, they are easily kept at bay with a properly formatted “robots.txt” file.
Follow Up: Killing the SpamBot Spiders
Almost every website operator wants search engine spiders to visit. After all, search engines are the best source of free traffic on the web. In the event that you don’t want them to visit, they are easily kept at bay with a properly formatted “robots.txt” file.