Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

More About How Your Site Appears to a Bot

The Google Webmaster Tools, explained in the previous section, help give you some notion of Google’s evaluation of your website. But let’s step back for a second and look at some general issues:

• Why this evaluation is very important

• How you can get a better intuitive feeling for bot evaluation

To state the obvious, before your site can be indexed by a search engine, it has to be found by the search engine. Search engines find websites and web pages using software that follows links to crawl the Web. This kind of software is variously called a crawler, a spider, a search bot, or simply a bot (bot is a diminutive for “robot”).

Note

You may be able to short circuit the process of waiting to be found by the search engine’s bot by submitting your URL or site map directly to search engines, as explained in Chapter 3.

To be found quickly by a search engine bot, it helps to have inbound links to your site. More important, the links within your site should work properly. If a bot encounters a broken link, it cannot reach, or index, the page pointed to by the broken link.

Images

Pictures don’t mean anything to a search bot. The only information a bot can gather about pictures comes from the file name, from the alt attribute used within a picture’s <img> tag, from text surrounding the picture, and in some cases from the image meta data. Therefore, always take care to provide description information via alt along with your images and at least one link (outside ...