Over the past thirty years, the way we seek information has changed dramatically. For our ancestors, the main sources of information were books, newspapers, and gossip. A little later, they were joined by radio and television, and today the most important medium is the Internet. The ability to get an almost instant answer to any question was unthinkable in the early 1990s.
A laptop in the dark background – illustrative photo. Omegle was a project intended for entertainment and communication, aimed at meeting new people. This, however, was also its weakest point. Image credit:
Philipp Katzenberger via Unsplash, free license
Today, if we don’t know something, we type it into Google: “What is SEO?”, “How do I launch a Google Ads campaign?”, “What causes a 500 error on my website?” and in a split second, we get hundreds of results that explain the SEO acronym, tell us step by step how to launch a Google Ads campaign, or what can cause a 500 error on a website and how to fix it. Who does it? Few people think about how Google knows these answers. These assistants are bots. Let’s take a closer look at them, namely, such representatives as traffic bot in this article. As well as a lot of useful general information.
How did it happen that we got a comprehensive answer to a question that none of our friends could answer in a split second? Let’s take a closer look.
Definition of the ‘Bot’
The bot traffic internet – is a computer program whose task is to perform automated actions on the network. Considering bot traffic meaning, internet bots are commonly used for useful as well as harmful activities. Depending on the application, an Internet bot can mimic the actions of a human to interact with a real person.
Types of Internet bots
We can divide computer programs of this type into several types. Among the most popular of these are:
- indexing bot – collects various information about websites, for example, Googlebot;
- scraper bot – used to read data from websites to, for example, purchase a certain product or inform about a discounted price. Bots of this type often save data for later analysis;
- spam bot – a robot that collects email addresses, which are then used to send spam;
- social media bot – generates messages on social media, often supporting a specific idea. Very often, they create fake accounts that are used to increase the number of followers. This is particularly evident on the Twitter platform;
- download bot – its purpose is to download files, which can result, for example, in boosting statistics for a particular application in the app store. Bots of this type can be used for DDoS attacks;
- automatic purchase bot – a bot whose job is to automatically purchase a commodity, such as a concert ticket or stock, for later resale at a profit;
- virus spreading bot – an Internet robot whose purpose is to steal data or infect a host. Criminals can use such bots to obtain information of interest. Computers infected in this way can later be used for DDoS attacks via that kind of bot traffic meaning;
- chatbot – a bot used to communicate in text form in place of a human. It uses advanced NLP algorithms and artificial iintelligence,or, in its simplest form, answers questions containing predetermined phrases. Even companies have emerged that offer easy-to-configure commercial chatbots that can be integrated into websites or profiles on social media platforms. Facebook allows you to create a bot to communicate on Messenger;
- voicebot – a robot whose purpose is to conduct voice conversations with customers.
Bots work much faster than humans. They can perform complex actions, and besides, their actions can be coordinated.
Internet bots have become a part of reality for good. The uses of Internet robots range from very useful, such as indexing Internet resources, to very malicious, such as infecting people with malware.
What is Googlebot, and how does it work?
Googlebot, like similar robots, is a program whose purpose is to scan websites or crawl. Googlebot mimics human behavior and, while browsing sites, “clicks” on links it finds. In this way, it arrives at brand-new subpages or at subpages that it analyzed some time ago. Thanks to the work of Google’s web robots, new subpages are added to the search engine’s index, and the content of previously scanned subpages is updated to its current state.
Speaking of Googlebot, we must distinguish several versions of it that specialize in crawling a certain type of content.
Some bots are used by Google’s search engine to index and refresh indexed pages, while others use other products and services. Each is specialized in indexing different types of content, which they do for different purposes. Some Googlebots mimic computer users, others are smartphone users, some scan only image files, others only videos, and so on. Below, we at SmartHub have listed the most important types of Googlebots that visit websites:
- Googlebot indexing smartphone sites – mimics smartphone and mobile device users, indexes websites,
- Computer Googlebot – mimics desktop users, indexes websites,
- Googlebot Image – indexes images, photos, and graphics for Google Graphics,
- Googlebot News – indexes news,
- Googlebot Video – indexes video content,
- AdsBot – is responsible for checking the content of ads on websites displayed on computers.
Why don’t Google robots index a website?
The process of indexing seems simple, and theoretically, after creating a new website and following the described instructions, we can “force” its content to be indexed within a few days.
Summary
As you can see, search engine robots, especially Googlebots, are extremely useful programs, without which it would be virtually impossible to use the Internet as we do today. It is thanks to them that when we type queries in search engines, we get comprehensive answers. It is the robots that are responsible for getting our site into the search engine, and the copy stored by the search engine is regularly updated. So if you have a website, it is worthwhile to adjust it to make it friendly to Google’s robots. If you don’t have the skills to adjust the code of your site yourself, I encourage you to enlist the help of SmartHub specialists, who will optimize your site to meet the requirements of Google Bots and help you position it for keywords related to your business on the site.