Web spider, also known as a web crawler or searchbot, is an automated tool that systematically scans websites and platform for relevant data. It follows links within a site to explore its content and collect valuable information. This process helps in building up the inventory for search engines, helping them present results accurately.
Web spiders have various uses across industries; some of the most popular ones include:
Site maps help search engine crawlers to index sites' pages effectively. A spider ensures that all essential web pages are accounted for when creating website maps.
The Robots exclusion protocol informs robots which areas of the website they should avoid crawling.
Spiders use this directory project to understand what topics are covered by websites suitable for specific visitors.
Refers to techniques such as Link analysis that allows spiders only to gather data on URLs deemed important because they do not follow spammy practices such as keyword stuffing etc.
A spider visits a given website domain thoroughly and indexes each page found looking at things like page metadata tag contents at high level content level details such body text amounts headers titles images/videos used.
There is no possible way to prevent snippers if your site can be accessed via http but using -robots.txt specifies what urls/locations where machines/crawler-type services view/-match it won't go if referenced in their headers.
References:
[1]: The Art of SEO (3rd Edition) by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer & Jessie Stricchiola.
[2]: Search Engine Optimization-Bruce Claye- Wiley Publishing.
[3]: Pro HTML5 with CSS, Javascript and Multimedia: Complete website Development and Best Practices by Mark J. Collins.
[4]: Practical Web Analytics for User Experience (Pearson) - Michael Beasley.
[5]: Web Scraping with Python: Collecting More Data from the Modern Web - Ryan Mitchell
