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Today's Google Bots and What They Do
By Kim Roach,
a staff writer and editor
kim@seo-news.com
www.unleashthetraffic.com/traffic
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Google currently indexes over 8 billion web
pages. However, before these pages were placed in
the index, they were each crawled by a special spider
known as the GoogleBot. Unfortunately, many web masters
do not know about the internal workings of this virtual
robot.
In fact, Google actually uses a number of spiders
to crawl the Web. You can catch these spiders by examining
your log files.
This article will attempt to reveal some of the most
important Google spiders, their function, and how
they affect you as a web master. We'll start with
the well-known GoogleBot.
GoogleBot
Googlebot, as you probably know, is the search bot
used by Google to scour the web for new pages. Googlebot
has two versions, deepbot and freshbot. Deepbot is
a deep crawler that tries to folow every link on the
web and download as many pages as it can for the Google
index. It also examines the internal structure of
a site, giving a complete picture for the index.
Freshbot, on the other hand, is a newer bot
that crawls the web looking for fresh content. The
Google freshbot was implemented to take some of the
pressure off of the GoogleBot. The freshbot recalls
pages already in the index and then crawls them for
new, modified, or updated pages. In this way, Google
is better equipped to keep up with the ever-changing
web.
This means that the more you update your web site
with new, quality content, the more the Googlebot
will come by to check you out.
If you'd like to see the Googlebot crawling around
your web property more often, you need to obtain quality
inbound links. However, there is also one more step
that you should take. If you haven't already done
so, you should create a Google Sitemap for your site.
Creating a Google sitemap allows you to communicate
with Google, telling them about your most important
pages, new pages, and updated pages. In return, Google
will provide you with some valuable information as
well. Google Sitemaps will tell you about pages it
was unable to crawl and links it was unable to follow.
This allows you to pinpoint problems and fix them
so that you can gain increased exposure in the search
results.
The next Google bot in our lineup is known as the
MediaBot.
MediaBot - used to analyze Adsense pages
useragent: Mediapartners-Google
MediaBot is the Google crawler for Adsense Publishers.
Mediabot is used to determine wich ads Google should
display on Adsense pages.
Google recommends that webmasters specifically add
a command in their robots.txt file that grants Mediabot
access to their entire site. To do this, simply enter
the following code into your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
This will ensure that the MediaBot is able to place
relevant Adsense ads on your site.
Keep in mind that ads can still be shown on
a page if the MediaBot has not yet visited. If that
is the case, the ads chosen will be based on the overall
them of the other pages on the site. If no ads can
be chosen, the dreaded public service announcements
are displayed instead.
There is a strong debate over whether or not the MediaBot
is giving websites with Adsense an advantage in the
search engines.
Even Matt Cutts has confirmed that the Adsense
Mediabot is indexing webpages for Google's main index.
He states, "Pages with AdSense will not be indexed
more frequently. It's literally just a crawl cache,
so if e.g. our news crawl fetched a page and then
Googlebot wanted the same page, we'd retrieve the
page from the crawl cache. But there's no boost at
all in rankings if you're in AdSense or Google News.
You don't get any more pages crawled either."
Matt Cutts claims that your website does not get any
advantage by using Adsense. However, in my mind, simply
getting your site updated in and of itself is an advantage.
This is very similar to Google Analytics, which
also promotes a slightly higher degree of spider activity.
Those who run Google Analystics on their site can
expect additional spider activity.
However, you certainly shouldn't depend on
any of these tools for getting your site indexed.
The key to frequent spidering is having quality inbound
links, quality content, and frequent updates.
Have images on your site? If so, you have likely been
visited by our next Google spider, the ImageBot.
ImageBot - used to crawl for the Image Search
useragent: GoogleBot-Image
The Imagebot prowls the Web for images to place in
their image search. Images are ranked based upon their
filename, surrounding text, alt text, and page title.
If you have a website that is primarily image based,
then you would definitely want to optimize your images
to receive some extra Google traffic.
On the other hand, some web sites may not benefit
from Google image search. In most cases, the traffic
from the Image search engine is very low quality and
rarely converts into buyers. Many people are often
just looking for images that they can swipe. So, if
you want to save some bandwidth, use your robots.txt
file to block ImageBot from accessing your image directory.
One of the few exceptions I would make is if you have
a site dedicated to downloadable images.
Our final bot is completely dedicated to the Google
Adwords program.
AdsBot - Checks Adwords landing pages for quality
useragent: AdsBot-Google
AdsBot is one of Google's newest spiders. This new
crawler is being used to analyze the content of advertising
landing pages, which helps determing the Quality score
that Google assigns to your ads.
Google uses this Quality score in combination with
the amount you are willing to bid to determine the
position of your ads. Therefore, ads with a high quality
score can rank higher even if other advertisers are
paying more than you.
This is one of Google's many efforts to ensure that
they are delivering the best results to their users.
Can you still block being spidered? Of course, but
it will lower your overall Adwords quality score,
which could end up lowering the positioning of your
ads. If possible, it is best to give AdsBot complete
access to your site.
Today's Google bots are becoming more advanced
all the time. However, nothing beats relevant, quality,
updated content. Deliver that and the search engines
will eat it up.
Kim Roach
is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews
and SEO-News
newsletters. You can contact Kim at: kim@seo-news.com
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