Introduction
If you are in the field of digital marketing and learning about it You must know “What technology do search engines use to crawl websites?Generally, when someone asks the question they provide a few options. Here are the few options available.
We will help you to understand this topic very well. We are going to start our topic with Bots, Search Engines, and Website Crawls.
Search Engine Bots
Search engines use bots to crawl website content. They have automated programs that help with different purposes and serve uniquely. Search engines always try to find updated or new pages and sites to add new useful content. It does not find only new and updated content it also suspects malware and the number of traffic each site receives.Are Bots Beneficial Tools?
As bots are just automated programs, we can’t summarize their effectiveness in an evaluation. However, bots help search engines in many ways, such as finding new and valuable content and indexing it.As we know it is very important to index the content because only after indexing the content will be visible to Google the people are looking for. Bots help search engines to identify and blacklist malware websites so that users can use the internet safely.
Do Bots Have Sometimes Bad Reputation?
As we have read above Bots are automated Programs, They can help to complete many functions. I am not saying that all functions are good some functions are bad like spammy content or scrapping confidential information.Bots are also very familiar with e-commerce, They scale the products, and after that, these products are purchased in mass at retail prices and then they sent back to the marketplace with an increased price.
Bots have other nefarious uses where bots are used for purposes such as aim assistance in shooter games, which gives the players more favors than other players.
Role of Bots in SEO
Bots play a significant role in the field of SEO, Search engines Like Google use website Crawlers or Bots to find new content for index. When Bots crawl our new pages they try to find out about the content so search engines can rank these pages very well.We make sure that our website crawls by Bots If it isn’t being crawled frequently, our content will not show on Google properly, and unable to index new or updated content.
In fact, Google always determines the content that crawls by bots whether or not to rank a content.
Types of Bots
There are two types of Bots that affect our website’s SEO.Good Bots
Good Bots are Search Engine Bots or Web Crawlers that help to discover and index new content. Good Bots help to find new content and rank on Google.In addition to Search Engine Bots, there are a few kinds of Good Bots:
Bad Bots
Besides Good Bots, Bad Bots are also available on the internet that perform a variety of nefarious activities like Black Hat SEO activities and they are mainly designed to harm our website such as:How Can We Detect Bad Bots on Our Website
Google Analytics is the best way to check our website’s bot traffic(web traffic generated by good or bad bots). From there we can see the different types of browsers and devices people use to engage with our website.If you see unknown devices or browsers in the list, they may be malicious bots. To get rid of malicious bots, you can redirect them to another website or block them.
If you don't know how to block a malicious bot, you can contact your web host and they will help you.
How Can We Reduce Bad Bot Traffic
Bad Bot Traffic can harm our website in many ways therefore, it is essential for us to reduce the bad bot traffic.Here are a few things we can do to reduce bad bot traffic:
1. By using a Security Plugin
Wordfence is a security plugin that helps us identify bad bot traffic, from where they are coming. It helps block all bad bots and accessing our website.2. By using a Captcha
A Captcha is a test that humans can pass by reading, identifying, or solving problems but Bots cannot. If we add a captcha to our website it will help to reduce bad bot traffic and spam attacks.3. By using a HoneyPot
A honeypot is a trap of bots. By adding a honeypot we can trick bots into revealing themselves as a honeypot is a hidden form field that Bots can fill but humans cannot.4. By Restricting Access to Our Website
We can also reduce bad bot traffic by restricting access to our website.For example - You can protect a few pages with a password or use Cloudflare to block IP addresses that are known to be malicious activities.
How Can We Increase Good Bot Traffic
In addition to reducing bad bot traffic, we should also focus on increasing good bots for SEO. Here are a few things we must apply.1. Website Must be Accessible to Bots
If our website design is clear and simple that means the code is well-organized. We are required to use the robots.txt script carefully. This script helps Bots to index and not index on our website.If we do have not more knowledge about this, We may accidentally block good bots from crawling our website.
To get more knowledge about the proper use of Robots.txt we must visit Google’s comprehensive guide.
2. Use of Sitemaps
A sitemap contains all the pages that our website has. We can help good bots by adding a sitemap to our website and it will help to index pages rapidly.To create a sitemap, we can use XML sitemaps or a plugin like Yoast SEO. Once we have done the next step would be the submission of it to the search console.
3. Use of Structured Data
Structured Data ( Schema Markup) helps search engines to understand the content of our website.It may be confusing at first but we can create it easily by using tools. For example: We can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to create and add structured data to our website.
4. Publishing New Content Regularly
We have heard “Content is the King”. When we upload new content regularly search engine bots crawl our websites on a regular basis and it helps in SEO.By generating new and fresh content we can improve our website’s SEO and attract new visitors to our websites.
Conclusion:
As we all know, all things have a good and bad impact like this, Bot has also good and bad effects on our website. We can improve our website’s SEO with the right strategy.The right SEO Strategy helps good bots crawl our websites and improve SEO while it will help to reduce the effect of bad bots on our website.
If you need any kind of help in SEO, please ping back or contact us via email, we provide SEO services at a reasonable cost as our priority is helping you out!