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Google currently indexes over 8 billion web pages. However,
before these pages were placed in the index, they were each
crawled by a special spider known as the GoogleBot.
Unfortunately, many web masters do not know about the internal
workings of this virtual robot.
Today's Google Bots
and What They Do
By Kim Roach (c) 2006
Google currently indexes over 8 billion web pages. However,
before these pages were placed in the index, they were each
crawled by a special spider known as the GoogleBot.
Unfortunately, many web masters do not know about the internal
workings of this virtual robot.
In fact, Google actually uses a number of spiders to crawl the
Web. You can catch these spiders by examining your log files.
This article will attempt to reveal some of the most important
Google spiders, their function, and how they affect you as a web
master. We'll start with the well-known GoogleBot.
GoogleBot
Googlebot, as you probably know, is the search bot used by Google
to scour the web for new pages. Googlebot has two versions,
deepbot and freshbot. Deepbot is a deep crawler that tries to
folow every link o要 the web and download as many pages as it can
for the Google index. It also examines the internal structure of
a site, giving a complete picture for the index.
Freshbot, o要 the other hand, is a newer bot that crawls the web
looking for fresh content. The Google freshbot was implemented to
take some of the pressure off of the GoogleBot. The freshbot
recalls pages already in the index and then crawls them for new,
modified, or updated pages. In this way, Google is better
equipped to keep up with the ever-changing Web.
This means that the more you update your web site with new,
quality content, the more the Googlebot will come by to
check you out.
If you'd like to see the Googlebot crawling around your web
property more often, you need to obtain quality inbound links.
However, there is also o要e more step that you should take. If you
haven't already done so, you should create a Google Sitemap for
your site.
Creating a Google sitemap allows you to communicate with Google,
telling them about your most important pages, new pages, and
updated pages. In return, Google will provide you with some
valuable information as well. Google Sitemaps will tell you
about pages it was unable to crawl and links it was unable to
follow. This allows you to pinpoint problems and fix them so that
you can gain increased exposure in the search results.
The next Google bot in our lineup is known as the MediaBot.
MediaBot - used to analyze Adsense pages
useragent: Mediapartners-Google
MediaBot is the Google crawler for Adsense Publishers. Mediabot
is used to determine wich ads Google should display o要 Adsense
pages.
Google recommends that webmasters specifically add a command in
their robots.txt file that grants Mediabot access to their entire
site. To do this, simply enter the following code into your
robots.txt file:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
This will ensure that the MediaBot is able to place relevant
Adsense ads o要 your site.
Keep in mind that ads can still be shown o要 a page if the
MediaBot has not yet visited. If that is the case, the ads
chosen will be based o要 the overall theme of the other pages
on the site. If no ads can be chosen, the dreaded public
service announcements are displayed instead.
There is a strong debate over whether or not the MediaBot is
giving websites with Adsense an advantage in the search engines.
Even Matt Cutts has confirmed that the Adsense Mediabot has
indexed webpages for Google's main index.
He states, "Pages with AdSense will not be indexed more
frequently. It's literally just a crawl cache, so if e.g. our
news crawl fetched a page and then Googlebot wanted the same
page, we'd retrieve the page from the crawl cache. But there's
no boost at all in rankings if you're in AdSense or Google News.
You don't get any more pages crawled either."
Matt Cutts claims that your website does not get any advantage
by using Adsense. However, in my mind, simply getting your site
updated in and of itself is an advantage.
This is very similar to Google Analytics, which also promotes a
slightly higher degree of spider activity.
Those who run Google Analytics o要 their site can expect
additional spider activity.
However, you certainly shouldn't depend o要 any of these tools
for getting your site indexed. The key to frequent spidering is
having quality inbound links, quality content, and frequent
updates.
Have images o要 your site? If so, you have likely been visited by
our next Google spider, the ImageBot.
ImageBot - used to crawl for the Image Search
useragent: GoogleBot-Image
The Imagebot prowls the Web for images to place in Google's
image search. Images are ranked based upon their filename,
surrounding text, alt text, and page title.
If you have a website that is primarily image based, then you
would definitely want to optimize your images to receive some
extra Google traffic.
On the other hand, some web sites may not benefit from Google
image search. In most cases, the traffic from the Image search
engine is very low quality and rarely converts into buyers. Many
people are often just looking for images that they can swipe. So,
if you want to save some bandwidth, use your robots.txt file to
block ImageBot from accessing your image directory.
One of the few exceptions I would make is if you have a site
dedicated to downloadable images.
Our final bot is completely dedicated to the Google Adwords
program.
AdsBot - Checks Adwords landing pages for quality
useragent: AdsBot-Google
AdsBot is o要e of Google's newest spiders. This new crawler is
being used to analyze the content of advertising landing pages,
which helps determine the Quality score that Google assigns to
your ads.
Google uses this Quality score in combination with the amount
you are willing to bid to determine the position of your ads.
Therefore, ads with a high quality score can rank higher even
if other advertisers are paying more than you.
This is o要e of Google's many efforts to ensure that they are
delivering the best results to their users.
Can you still block being spidered? Of course, but it will lower
your overall Adwords quality score, which could end up lowering
the positioning of your ads. If possible, it is best to give
AdsBot complete access to your site.
Today's Google bots are becoming more advanced all the time.
However, nothing beats relevant, quality, updated content.
Deliver that and the search engines will eat it up.
==========================================
Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews
(http://www.sitepronews.com) and SEO-News (http://www.seo-
news.com) newsletters. You can contact Kim at: kim @ seo-news.com
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