Gotta love them gotta hate them...Google Bots

I have reentry opened a new shop on ETSY selling beads and jewelry supplies so I am as giddy as the day I opened my first etsy shop. I check it every few minutes to see if I have had any new views hearts or if anyone has added me to their circle.

After a few years of trying to sell my wares on the internet I have a little bit more knowledge about how it all works but I thought I would do a test all the same. After listing a new item tweeting it and face booking it you generally end up after about 10-15 mins with about 4-6 views. I would like to think that they are real people but I know they are bots.

So I listed an item and I resisted the urge to post it anywhere, I left it over night and when I checked it in the morning still not a single view...BOOOO, not even a bot!

So even though those first 3-4 views are not real people they  play a very important roll in the internet. They harvest information and index it for google and other search engines so that others may find us at a later date.

I found this article on google bots that will explain it much better than I ever could...damn those google bots.

Google Bots Types

1. Google Bot: This is the bot used by Google to scour the web to identify new pages. It has two different versions. Deep bot and Fresh bot. As the name suggests, Deep bottries to follow every link and downloads as many pages as possible. It tries to read minute details of a site including the internal structure.

Fresh bot crawls the web in search of fresh content. The Fresh bot crawls the already indexed pages in search of newly updated content. This way Google tries to give fresh and updated information in the search results. Hence it is important to have quality inbound links if you’d like Fresh bot crawling your site more and more often.

2. Media Bot: If you are wondering how Google places different relevant ads in your different pages, here is the answer. Media bot analyzes AdSense pages and decides which ads to be placed on different pages.

So if you want to allow Media bot to access your entire site put this code in robot.txt file.
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*

Remember that ads will still be shown in your pages even if Media bot has not visited your site yet. In such a case, ads will be chosen based on the overall theme of your site.

3. Image Bot: Image bot is used to crawl the images and place them in Google’s image search. Images are ranked based on their file name, alt text, surrounding text and page title.  If your website is primarily image based, then you’d definitely want to tweak and optimize your images to receive extra traffic from Google image search results.

However, all the Google traffic may not convert into buyers as many people are just looking for images. So if you want to block Image Bot from accessing your images and save bandwidth, you can do it in your robot.txt file.

4. Ads Bot: It crawls and analyzes the advertising landing pages and determines the quality score that will be assigned to your ads. Along with this score, Google uses your bid amount to determine the position of your ads. Hence it is important to have quality content on the landing page of your advertisement. Sometimes Google positions high quality ads first even when others are willing to pay more. It is advised to give AdsBot complete access to your site.

By now you must have understood that it is important to give complete access to Google if you want to increase your search engine visibility. One way is to create a sitemap for your site. A sitemap tells Google about your most important, new and updated pages. Google inturn tells you the pages it was unable to crawl. This helps you pinpoint the problems and fix them as soon as possible with which you can gain increased traffic and exposure from search engine results.

Google is ever-changing and Google spiders are becoming more advanced all the time. However, relevant, updated and quality content along with good inbound links make your site stand front in this every changing search engine world.