Search Engine Crawlers: Who’s visiting my site and why?

Organizations implementing search engine optimization (SEO) strategies will sooner or later consider monitoring search engine crawling activity. Before a web page can appear in search results, the content has to be discovered through a crawling or spidering process. This is done through software which automatically navigates the web, finding and downloading web content for the search engine to parse, index and rank.

search engine spider

A “spider”, also known as a “crawler”, “robot” or simply “bot”, finds and retrieves web pages. Once a search engine finds your site, either through a link from another site or through a submission form, the “spider” will begin to crawl your site.

Search engine crawling activity is an early sign that SEO is functioning or a potential warning sign of site issues impeding content discovery.

• Frequent and deep crawling indicates that a Search Engine has detected that content is usually up to date and is thought highly of by others. It also provides the first indication as to the success of SEO – crawling happens before index updates are visible on-line.
• Insufficient crawling activity is an advance warning that SEO site improvements won’t be on-line anytime soon – perhaps site content hasn’t been updated in several years? Perhaps no other sites have linked in?

Some commercial web server log file based web analytics reporting tools, such as ClickTracks, provide reports an organization can use to verify:

• which search engine bots are finding a website’s content
• the percentage of pages found
• the recency of bot visits which translates to site page freshness in engine results

Open source web analytics tools such as Analog and AWStats can provide a subset of this information.

Major Search Engine bots

The following is a list of the major search engine and search engine related service bots we have come across, with a brief note on their usage. Use this information based on your website’s priorities to monitor specific crawling activity.

When tracking search engine robots, it is important to track not only the robot’s name in the useragent data, but to verify the robot’s host name as well. Some users and robots will spoof a well-known search engine robot when navigating your site.

Additional Robot Resources

Comprehensive Bot listings are maintained by several sites:

• robotstxt.org
• jafsoft.com
• psychedelix.com User Agents
• Tnl.net User Agents

Web analytics system configuration tip: Crawler reports are not usually pre-defined in web analytics systems. Fortunately, they are easy to add. The key is to report on „Pages by User Agent”, where the user agent is the name of the Search Engine bot. Embedded tag solutions may not be able track non-human traffic — check for these limitations before making a commitment to a particular solution; while embedded tag solutions have some significant advantages over web log analysis systems, this, despite what you might be told, is not one of them.

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