A web crawler, also known as a spider or bot, is a program designed to systematically browse the internet, retrieving and indexing information from web pages. It operates by following hyperlinks from one page to another, collecting data for search engines or other purposes such as website indexing and data mining. Google Search Central has published a new video ‘What is a web crawler, really?’. The GSC team says, “In this episode of Search Off the Record, Gary Illyes and Lizzi Sassman take a deep dive into crawling the web: what is a web crawler, and how does it really work? Listen... [...]

Google Search Central has published a new video ‘How Google Search crawls pages’. The GSC team says, “Discover the steps that go into how Google Search “crawls”” or finds and fetches web pages to display on Search, from URL discovery to fetching and rendering. Learn what Googlebot is, what it does, if Googlebot crawls every URL it finds, why sitemaps can be helpful for your website, and much more!”  [...]