Search Engine Robots - How They Work, What They Do
(Part I)
By Daria Goetsch

Automated search engine robots, sometimes called "spiders" or "crawlers", are the seekers of web pages. How do they work? What is it they really do? Why are they important?

You'd think with all the fuss about indexing web pages to add to search engine databases, that robots would be great and powerful beings.

Wrong. Search engine robots have only basic functionality like that of early browsers in terms of what they can understand in a web page. Like early browsers, robots just can't do certain things. Robots don't understand frames, Flash movies, images or JavaScript. They can't enter password protected areas and they can't click all those buttons you have on your website. They can be stopped cold while indexing a dynamically generated URL and slowed to a stop with JavaScript navigation. How Do Search Engine Robots Work?