Kelli Roberts

googlebot

WTH is Googlebot?

I tell my clients to always invest in a good stats programs and since you can typically get a program like awstats for free, you just need to have your web hosting company install it on your server, there is never an excuse not to have a real server side stats program.

Stats programs are awesome because they tell you all sorts of fun things like how many actual visitors a day are at your website and where in the world they came to you from.  You’ll see that sometimes another site may send them over or sometimes they came to you from search engines.  A good stats program like awstats (or the like) will even tell you what common keywords people use to search when they find your website.

Another fun thing it can tell you is what web browsers people are using to visit your website.  If you know what people are using to see your site then you know what it will look like when you check your own pages in those various browsers.  46% of the people who visit this site use Firefox, 29% use Safari, 15.9% use IE.  I would have thought Chrome numbers would have been much higher by now but apparently I was wrong.

One of the clients I had get a stats program came back to me with a question and while I thought it was pretty common knowledge these days after speaking with him and a few others, I realized maybe I was wrong.  Maybe people don’t know as much about search engine technology as I had thought they did.

His question was, WTH is Googlebot?  Is it something to do with Google.com?  I noticed it has been at my blog every day.  Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

The answer is yes, Googlebot is Google’s web crawling bot or spider. It has everything to do with Google and is it a good thing that Googlebot is visiting you daily?  Yes it is.  Googlebot will visit your site and sort of crawl through your pages to see what new things you have added or what has been updated since it last visited you.  The more often you add new content, the more Googlebot will visit your site and and that should equal better search results for you which means the more people Google’s search engine can send your site.

 

 

 

WTH is Googlebot?