A web crawler (also known as a crawler, bot, spider or searchbot) is a software program that searches, analyzes and then indexes content on the internet. The content comes from websites and can be images, texts or videos, for example.
A web crawler searches certain URLs and follows every link on websites. Both hyperlinks and HTML codes are checked - unless the link attribute rel="nofollow" is used. Website administrators also have the option of excluding visits from crawlers via robots.txt if this is not desired.
Within search engine optimization(SEO), care should be taken to ensure that crawlers can optimally search websites so that all content is included in the search engine index. This requires powerful robots.txt files as well as the exclusion of sensitive areas through the meta specification "noindex".
In order to increase the frequency of visits by crawlers, a high number of backlinks as well as clear internal linking are necessary. The clearer and better structured websites are, the easier they can be crawled, resulting in a better ranking in the SERPs.
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