In the complex world of SEO, there are a variety of ways to increase your search engine rankings. From adding keywords to your meta titles and on-page content to building a winning portfolio of links, there’s no shortage of things you can do to increase your rankings. But, none of it is worthwhile unless you can get Googlebot to visit your site.
Who is Googlebot?
While the name may sound a bit like a superhero (it’s a bird…it’s a plane…it’s a Googlebot?), a Googlebot agent is actually the specific web crawler that crawls the Web to build Google’s searchable index of website listings. This spider plays a very important role in increasing a website’s rankings on Google.
The presence of Googlebot robots on your site means that search-engine giant Google is actively archiving changes you’ve made and adjusting its index (and eventually rankings) accordingly. How do you know if your site’s been crawled? All you have to do is look for the cached version of your site (available on the Google toolbar). It will show you the date and time your site was cached, as well as a copy of your site as it appeared at that time.
You can also tell a Googlebot spider not to visit selected pages and directories on your website. Perhaps you have database content, scripts, or images on the site that you don’t want in the search engine listings. You may have directories that duplicate content on other pages (one example would be “printer friendly” pages) or you may want to limit the bandwidth load caused by search engine spiders. Whatever the reason, you can either set up nofollow tags or use the “disallow” command to tell Google to focus exclusively on the content you want.
So, while Googlebot isn’t exactly a superhero, its regular presence on your website can mean the start of enhanced Google rankings. Ready to learn more? Contact us at 1-877-Rank-321 to speak to one of our SEO specialists about Googlebot, search engines, rankings and more!
Tags: Googlebot
