What Technology do Search Engines Use to Crawl Websites?

By Arshath | June 9, 2023

You have been doing website crawling, ranking, and indexing for a long may be. But do you know there are more ways to crawl your website on search engines? You will know more about the details of what technology do search engines use. Let’s go.

What technology do search engines use to crawl websites?

Crawling means making the website find the new and old content by fetching the webpages in the websites th

ey crawled by the respective search engine i.e… discovery of pages. In order to do that, you need to submit or give access to the search engine to allow them to crawl on your website and you can restrict or allow which they can crawl or not crawl.

It will be done each time periodically. So, whatever changes you made on the website after the first crawl, will be fetched as the changes made on the second crawl. Note that, whatever changes are made in-between will not be taken into account unless it is crawled which means the discovery of a web page on a search engine is not possible.

Once you are sure of the website crawl, the next step is to make sure the website is getting indexed. It is where the crawled page information is stored and gives the result according to the user input from the index data.

To check if search engines have indexed your site or not, enter “site:” followed by the URL of your domain. For example, “site:website.com”.

ALSO READ: How to Rank a Website in Search Results?

Way Search Engine Crawl the Website:

Sitemaps

A search engine can discover a website’s pages by crawling the sitemap. The sitemap contains all the URLs in a website so that search crawl easily of the webpage URLs.  It will help a search engine find content whether it is small or large that you think is important that visitors want to know and also it will help the webmaster understand where sites get indexing and for how long.

Page submissions

Another method is that you can manually submit the website and page URL on the Submission directory websites through the respective search engine only. It can be used to discover new pages are created or existing pages get updated and have changes in the content so that it will take less time for a search engine to find them.

When going for large URL content, you can use sitemap XML to crawl and do manual submission for a few pages. Note that the page submission is limited per day.

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BOTS

This technology is used by search engines to scan or crawl the website which is also called a web crawler or spider or bot. Bot usually makes the crawling by checking the robot.txt file first for the possibility of URLs in the website. While doing so on the URLs in the robot.txt file, it will also check the links that attach to other pages and start crawling that too. When there is a change in the content either remove, added, updated, or moved to a new location, the web crawler will re-crawl the websites from time to time to make sure the content is updated at last. These bots will crawl whole websites which are mentioned inside the robot.txt file.

The popular bot to crawl the websites is Googlebot, BingBot, Slurp bot, and Yandex Bot.

Hope, the information gave you clarity on crawling methods that search engine uses to crawl websites.