Google bots, also known as Google crawlers or spiders, are software programs used by Google to discover, crawl automatically, and index web pages on the Internet. These bots follow links on web pages to discover new pages and update existing pages in the Google index. Google uses a variety of bots to crawl and index web pages, including the Googlebot, the main crawler for Google’s web search, and the Googlebot for Images, Googlebot for News, and Googlebot for Video, which are specialized crawlers for different types of content.
Google bots work by sending an HTTP request to a web server to retrieve a webpage, analyzing the webpage’s content, and extracting information such as the title, keywords, and links. The bots then follow the links on the webpage to discover other web pages and repeat the process to index the entire website.
Google bots are designed to follow the rules set out in the robots.txt file, which is a file that can be placed in the root directory of a website to indicate which pages or sections of the website should not be crawled. Website owners and webmasters can use the robots.txt file to control which pages are indexed by Google and to prevent the bots from crawling sensitive or private pages.
Google bots also use the sitemap file to discover web pages, an XML file that lists all the pages on a website and their URLs. Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console will help the crawlers to find all the pages of a website and to understand the website’s structure.
Google bots run continuously and update their index regularly, ensuring that the most recent versions of web pages are included in the search results. This allows Google to return the most relevant and up-to-date results to users. However, it’s important to note that Google bots can take time to crawl, index, and rank new or updated web pages.
Also, See: Crawling In SEO