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Publisher's Note
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A Day in the Life of a Search Engine Spider

How does a search engine spider scan your site? What's it looking for? What does it value? What does it ignore? In order to get some critical points across about this most strategic aspect of search engine optimization (SEO), I thought it best to personify a search engine spider and give it a voice. Let's call this personified spider Charlotte. Her narrative begins directly...

As a search engine spider, I must say I'm very misunderstood. First, I find that people try to fool me a lot. They try to make me think their site is bigger or more popular than it really is. They often repeat words and phrases incessantly. When I feel I'm overly manipulated, I get very angry and report back to the search engine that this particular site is taking advantage of me. We then penalize that site.

So what do I like? What makes me happy to see your site? Well, think about what my mission is. My job is to make search results at my search engine as juicy and relevant as possible, so the user never thinks about going to another search engine.

I like popular sites. If lots of other popular sites point to you, and they have similar types of keyword phrases around their links to you, I'm impressed. My thinking is, if other quality sites like you, then that's a human's judgment at work, which speaks volumes to me.

What's your reputation? I'm apt to look at the "reputation" of a specific page on your site. What you put in the link tag helps me decide what to think of the page even before I get there. If you have "Go to Page 2" then I'm thinking this page is all about 2, whatever that is. But if you say "Read more about Internet marketing", then I'm getting a better idea of what that page is all about.

Don't get too deep! Look, I don't want to complain too much, but I suck up over a billion pages daily. I get cranky when I'm asked to go three, four, or five levels into your site. I've got things to do and places to go. Don't ask me to work to hard.

Keep the load time down, please. With billions of pages to catalog, I don't have much time to wait around whilst your page loads. In short, make it snappy and a greater percentage of that page is apt to get picked up by me.

Databases pages bum me out, too. It's hard work figuring out dynamic pages and pages churned out by a database. I like light HTML pages with links and keywords I can easily sift through.

Don't be so dense. Don't make me sift through lots of HTML code and graphic placeholders and other sundry things to get to the good stuff. Make your Web pages like a rich chocolate dessert to me, where they are so tasty I just have to take another bite.

Show me some links. Many sites don't want to have outbound links because they want to keep the visitor on their site for the rest of their lives, if possible. Well, that's not reality. Show me other sites with good content like yours so I can follow those links to even more valuable information, which makes for better search results all around.

OK, I've got to go! After all I've got billions of pages out there to index. Happy optimizing!

Stay tuned for more insights from Charlotte the Search Engine Spider. LC

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