Googlebots--What Are They and What Do They Do?
Frequently Asked Questions about Googlebots
What is Googlebot?
Googlebot is a web crawling bot. Which, of course, begs the question:
What is a bot?
A bot (short for “robot”) is a software application that performs automated tasks. Bots are most commonly used for web “crawling,” which is the process of analyzing and filing data on web pages. This is known as indexing.
Bots are often referred to as “web crawlers” or “spiders” because they methodically go line by line through all the files on a website, albeit much faster than any spider—or human—could ever go.
What is meant by “Google algorithms”?
You’ll see the word “algorithm” a lot when Google is discussed. This refers to the computer program Google uses to determine which sites to crawl, how often to crawl them and how many pages from each site it crawls.
The word “algorithm” comes from the name of the 9th century Persian mathematician, astronomer and geographer Al-Khwarizmi. A Latin translation of a mathematics book he wrote used the word “Algoritmi” as a Latinization of his name. The word came to refer to mathematics in general.
Today, when used in the context of computers, an algorithm is a sequence of tasks a computer is assigned to perform.
Why Do Googlebots Index Your Site?
Google’s web crawlers are constantly indexing websites so their search engine can provide searchers the best results possible for their online searches. Indexing allows them to discover new pages, as well as updated pages. All the information gathered by Google’s bots is filed on an index so it can be quickly referenced in response to a search someone does on whatever topic is indexed.
Do googlebots influence how a website ranks?
No, all the googlebot does is index everything on your site. Google’s search engine then tries to match searchers’ queries with the websites having the most relevant content. It primarily does this by cross referencing words in the searcher’s query with words (and related words) on websites.
How often do googlebots index websites?
How often Googlebots index a site depends largely upon how much traffic a site gets. High traffic sites are crawled more frequently than low traffic sites—and they are crawled as often as multiple times per day.
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