In an earlier post, we mentioned a not-so-little program that every independent search engine uses called a crawler. A crawler is essential to companies like Google and Yahoo!, and understanding what the crawler does is essential to earning high search engine positioning. Crawlers are how search engines find the Web pages that they list in their search results. The program does this by “crawling” across the Web, picking up pages, reading them, and determining things like their category and importance. The crawler also plays a huge role in deciding which pages get high search engine positioning and which ones do not.
So how often does the crawler visit each Web page? That depends on the page. The pages with high search engine positioning are visited more frequently. Less popular pages, pages with less content and pages that are updated less frequently are visited by the crawler less often.
So how can you earn high search engine positioning and find out how often Google’s crawler is visiting your Web page? An easy way to find out is by using Google’s cache.
You can start to earn high search engine positioning by conducting a Google search that brings up your Web page. Find your page in the results listings and take note of a little clickable link that appears at the bottom of each result. It’s the link named “Cached” that’s found after the green address bar, which follows each search result. Go ahead. Click on it.
What you should see is your Web site with a slim grey box at the top of your browser. This box tells you that this is Google’s cache of the page. In other words, it’s the page that Google’s crawler found the last time the crawler visited. Google’s crawler not only reads each page it visits to determine if it should receive high search engine positioning, but it also takes a snapshot of the page. It’s a snapshot that Google saves in its archives. The grey box will tell you the exact date that Google’s crawler last visited your page and took a snapshot.
It goes without saying that the more times Google’s crawler visits your page, the better chance you have for high search engine positioning. If you’ve been visited by the crawler recently, then Google probably thinks your page is important. In other words, they like you and will likely reward you with high search engine positioning. So how can you get the crawler to stop by more frequently? Here are a few basics that may get your site crawled more often than your competition and may get you high search engine positioning.
Have a sitemap:
Ever wonder what sitemaps do? They simply list all the pages on a Web site in one place. This can be helpful for human visitors. But for crawlers, it’s crucial. Crawlers love sitemaps because it makes their job of evaluating what’s on the page easy. A sitemap could translate into high search engine positioning. So help Google’s crawler out. Make sure you have a sitemap.
Keep your Web site structure simple:
A muddled cluster of pages on your site will only confuse the crawler. Confuse the crawler and it’ll be loathe re-visiting your Web page, and you won’t get high search engine positioning. So, again, make the crawler’s job easy and have a cleanly-constructed Web site.
Get rid of needless bells and whistles:
Google’s crawler will want to visit a clean, well-built site more often than a site with frames or JavaScript or excessive amounts of Flash. Too much of these things will endanger your high search engine positioning.
