A search engine crawler, also known as a web crawler, spiderbot, crawler, or spider, is an Internet bot that searches the web to find new and newly updated content. What kind of content is looked for by a search engine crawler? Content includes images, videos, and web pages, which are all indexed after being discovered by the web crawler.

What does an index include? The index includes the URL of a website, information about the IRL which includes relevant keywords, how recently a web page was updated,  and what type of content is being crawled. The index can also include how users interact with the web page.

A search engine crawler is beneficial to a website owner as it will allow the opportunity to be included in a list, index, or database to be discovered by users. This in turn, will lead to more traffic to your website. A business also benefits from search engine crawling as it allows for monitoring of what people are saying about you online. Whether these comments or reviews are negative or positive, knowing what people are saying gives you a chance to address them. More benefits that a business can experience from search engine crawlers include:

• Information about competition: knowing how much your competition is charging for similar products or services can help you to price yours.
• Help with finding leads: a search engine crawler can help to find your target audience based on what people are searching for and where they are spending time online. If your target audience is active on social media and you don’t yet have social media accounts or aren’t actively using them yet, this information should prompt you to start.
• Help finding typos and bad text
• Identifying overused keywords and key phrases

Does search engine crawling have any downsides? A website owner might find the search engine crawler to be disruptive. It may also result in too much information and become overwhelming to deal with. The crawler may be limited by your badwidth or storage, which is a disadvantage.

Hiring a person or company to develop a search engine crawler should be taken seriously. You want to hire someone who has experience and a good reputation. Some things to consider when deciding to have a crawler developed that you can discuss with the developer include not crawling during peak hours, how to handle crashes should they occur, and the goals that you have. Having a specific goal will help keep things from getting overwhelming. You probably aren’t wanting to crawl the entire Internet, but rather a handful of domains. Discussing goals with your developer will make everyone’s job easier.

Search engine crawlers can be very beneficial to website creators, businesses, and brands. They help to collect important data that can be used to improve your search engine optimization, which will lead to higher ranking and traffic to your website increasing. Thanks to search engine web crawlers, search engine results are organized and allow users to search with confidence they’ll get the best results.