Google Bot is an automatic tool used by Google using a mathematical process to continually crawl, just like a spider, through web pages and websites to find new and updated content to add to its database. At the same time it removes old links to dead pages or websites thus keeping the “index” of websites that it has listed, as up to date as possible. In short the Google bot checks your website and tells Google what it is all about so that Google can then present your website to people who are doing searches using keywords and phrases.
An important point is that the bot only reads text. So a page with no text will not perform well on Google because Google has nothing upon which to determine what that page is about. A page that does have text and so can be read by the Google bot will most probably get “indexed” and listed in the database. Of course it’s logical to then realise that if Google bot reads text to gain an understanding of what your page is about then it is reading words and phrases and so it’s important to ensure your relevant and desired words are in the page where Google can find them (giving rise to Search Engine Optimisation or SEO).
You can tell if the Google Bot has visited your website by looking at your website statistics supplied by your web host or by joining Google’s Webmaster Tools, which is a service provided free by Google. These tools will tell you how often the Google bot returns and checks your website. The bot follows links so the more links into your website the more often the bot will return.
What does all this mean to you? Well, it’s really important when your website is designed to ensure that the Google bot can find all of your pages. And when writing your content ensure that meaningful and relevant phrases are included and placed in the right places on your pages for Google to find. Quality keyword-rich content with relevant links into your pages is what the Google bot needs, and that is what you need in order for your website to perform well on Google.
Author: Stuart Wilkerson
Webstrategies
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what googlebot sees in your website?hmm…well they can only “see” is ‘text’ for them to categorize and indexed your website…they dont really care how good your design is…and of course the ‘relevancy’ of the content. Therefore, put great information in your content for them to hunt you down
Thanks for the comment. You are right of course in that Google cannot “see” a website – perhaps I was being a bit too basic there. You raise an excellent point that Google can only “read” text content of a web page and cannot read text that may be in images etc. Relevancy is a key consideration for any search engine optimisation work – keyphrases for any page must be supported by the content of the page. Adding keywords which are not relevant to the content of the page just for the benefit of Google is called keyword stuffing, is a “black hat” practice and can potentially cause penalisation of the website rankings by Google.