The Pulse Blog

By: Terrence Richard
A search engine robot is an automated program that crawls the internet and maintains an up-to-date index of all web-pages. While this may seem trivial, this simple process forms the backbone of how a modern search engine works. Although the exact workings of a search engine robot is proprietary information known only to the engineers at Google, most webmasters and internet marketers have a good idea of how such robots work. With such knowledge they can modify or optimize their websites to earn a better placement in search engine results.

The crawl rate of a search engine robot plays a vital role in any search engine optimization, or SEO, activities for a website. The rate at which a robot will crawl a particular webpage and update the index reflecting any new changes on that page has a direct effect on any online marketing campaigns.

Search engine robots determine the crawl rate for a website based on many factors. A robot may index a certain part of a site or the entire site based on some pre-established criteria. Some of the factors that can affect a search engine robots crawl rate are the amount of backlinks present, the number of internal links, the existence of a site-map and last but not least, the quality of the site's content.

The good news for webmasters and internet marketers is that there exists a complete range of site monitors from Google called the Google Webmaster Tools. This is a complete range of various online tools and automated monitoring programs that help a webmaster monitor every aspect of his or her site. Google's monitors are also implemented in the Google gadgets software suite for easy access through one's desktop. The activities of Google's search engine robot, or Googlebot, can be examined and a complete report of its crawling activity over the past three months on a particular site can be easily obtained. The Google site monitor tools also give information such as number of pages downloaded every day, total amount in kilobytes downloaded each day and even more advanced statistics.

Typically, the websites crawl rate is indirectly proportional to the robot's crawl cycle i.e. a minimal value in an average crawl cycle represents the highest number of crawls. The Google site monitors helps a webmaster correlate the crawling cycles of Googlebot and help them to change or adopt a winning SEO strategy for their site or online marketing campaign.