Googlebot

A Googlebot is used by the Google as a search bot. A search bot is a web robot which is used for the purpose of searching. A web robot is generally called a web crawler (or web spider). A web crawler is an automated program which browses the web in a routine, automated manner. Crawlers can be used for other tasks such as automated web maintenance. Googlebot uses the process of crawling to find out new and updated pages to be included in the Google index.

Multiple sets of computers are used to procure millions of pages on the web. Googlebot is the program that does the fetching. An algorithmic process is used by the bot for fetching. Computer programs determine the sites to be crawled, how recurrently these sites have to be crawled and how many pages needed to be indexed. The crawling process starts with a list of web page URLs and there will be Sitemap data provided by the webmasters. Googlebot enters all these web sites and finds links on these visited pages and includes them in a list of pages to crawl. Dead links are found, new sites detected and changes to existing sites are marked. Using the new discoveries the Google index is updated.

There are two versions to Google bot, deepbot and freshbot. Deepbot crawls in depth and follows almost every link on the web and delivers as many pages as it can to the Google indexers. Crawling using deepbot is done about once in every month. This is the time when Google Dance is witnessed on the web. Freshbot crawls the web in search of latest content. It visits websites that are changing continuously and according to how often they change. Googlebot also process information present in important content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can handle most content types, but cannot handle certain types such as Flash files or dynamic pages.

Googlebot takes up an enormous amount of bandwidth. This will result in the websites exceeding their bandwidth limit and be temporarily taken down. This is a serious problem webmasters have to tackle with. Webmaster tools are allocated by the Google to control the crawl rate. This will allow the server to handle the load more efficiently. Robot.txt files are used by webmasters to give information about their site to web robots. Using the necessary instruction in the robot.txt file you can either block or allow Googlebot from visiting your site.

Benefits of CSS for SEO.

A Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is a method which provides web designers enormous control over the style of web pages. CSS gives designers the freedom to allocate minimal code in the document’s source directives. CSS have gained widespread popularity because CSS pages are fast loading, complying with the standards and can be altered with relative ease. Above all CSS pages are highly compatible with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) standards.

HTML coding incorporates unnecessary code into the source code and as a result finding relevant keywords can be tedious for search engine robots. CSS helps in building light weight pages with efficient source coding. This helps the spiders to crawl your site much more efficiently leading to improved indexing of your website. CSS provides the opportunity to show the most valued content along with the necessary links at the start of the HTML file. This makes the job of the search engines much easier. Moreover search engine spiders consider the content at the top the most important.

CSS helps to highlight data highlight the data enclosed in an image. With HTML coding search engines will fail to find data enclosed within in an image. This is because data in an image will be considered as an image only and the data will not be noticed. By using CSS the image behind the text will remain there and the text will be highlighted. This will make the text visible to the search engine as well. While using CSS the navigation menu is made up of standard HTML elements such as unordered lists (

) and anchors (). This enables the search engines to find these links easily and as a result your site will be crawled to the maximum possible limit. Links constructed of non-HTML codes may not be visible to the crawler. Thus CSS has made deep crawling of your site possible.

For a designer CSS provides unlimited design possibilities. Sites constructed with CSS are easy to download for both the user who browse your site and for the search engines. It is understood that search engine spider allocate certain amount of time, bandwidth etc to crawl a site. With CSS pages more sites can be crawled with the available resources. As a result of deep crawling more pages will be shown in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

Designers simply cannot ignore the benefits of CSS. CSS has no equals when you consider the case of building a search engine friendly website. For a search engine your site is contemporary, affordable and friendly. CSS ensures your site will be crawled more often by search engines. Finally one thing is rest assured, a site using CSS layout will be indexed higher than a site using table based layout.