10+ Web Crawlers Tools
On the ever-endless World Wide Web, every website is aided substantially in its way by web crawlers, which helps to locate the abundance of web pages out there. These include digital spiders that otherwise are called as bots or robots that crawl the web to gather information for website directories, other websites, and other online services. In this article, we are going to discuss the phenomenon of web crawlers and present our reader with the 14 most widespread ones that drive the web world.
Most Common Web Crawlers to Add to Your Crawler List
1. Googlebot
Leading the web crawling front, Googlebot is Google’s own crawler that collects information to update the search engine’s index. It follows links to establish new search results and revisits seen sites to update them to make them more relevant.
In such a constantly running complex which is the internet, where information runs round the clock, Googlebot occupies a significant position; or, to be more precise, it tirelessly roams the world-wide Web. It is just not another digital entity; it’s the core of Google’s search engine and the catalogue of internet’s wealth of content.
Unlike earlier search engines, the Googlebot is intelligent enough to read web documents in a manner as it would be read by any browser. This helps it to parse the content created with the use of JavaScript and give a broader perspective of a given page’s content. Once the HTML and linking are downloaded, the application delivers the collected data to the Google analysis in order to create an index consisting of relevance, keywords, and other features.
User Agent | Googlebot |
Full User Agent String | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) |
Essentially, the Googlebot operating mechanism is important to website owners and digital marketers in order to improve the SEO strategy. Googlebot requires a website to be accessible, properly developed and built for mobile to crawl and index it correctly. Further, experience has proved that a website can benefit from the monitoring of crawl errors and offer the XML sitemaps to Googlebot.
2. Bingbot
The search engine Bing used by Microsoft uses Bingbot to crawl web pages and offer search results. Like Googlebot, it goes from link to link in order to surf the Web.
Just as with most other browsers, Bingbot is not limited to simply crawling texts only. It comes with the advantage of rendering specific webpage, get to know more about the content generated by JavaScript and the dynamism of the page. In addition, this rendering process improves Bingbot’s capability in understanding the subtleties of a page and help towards making better indexing and ranking decisions.
To echo the current mobile-friendly approach to browsing, Bingbot has shifted to a mobile-first approach to crawling. First and foremost, it focuses on the mobile version of the Web page, which makes it possible for Bing to provide the results corresponding to the user’s behavior. Having a site built to try and pass muster in mobile standards also makes it rank high in Bing’s seletion results due to Microsoft’s dedication to providing individuals with the best mobile browsing experience.
User Agent | Bingbot |
Full User Agent String | Desktop – Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
Mobile – Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) “W.X.Y.Z” will be substituted with the latest Microsoft Edge version Bing is using, for eg. “100.0.4896.127″ |
Well, for any webmaster or an SEO professional out there, knowledge of Bingbot’s activity is crucial to proper SEO. Crawling is made easier if the website is well designed with understandable organization and a design compatible with smartphones. Checking the crawl errors and sitemaps will improve the site’s ranking in Bing search results if there is an emphasis on significant keywords.
3. Yandex Bot
The Russian search engine, Yandex, uses Yandex Bot the aid it in its task of categorizing web page for its users. A it is to comprehend the Russian one: the search engine that is oriented on the Russian-speaking audience – sYandex, utilizes the help of Yandex Bot approaching Internet web pages that may be of interest to users. It is aimed at recognising Ukrainian writing system and put in the first place the materials in Russian (although the designation of the target language is still ambiguous for now).
User Agent | YandexBot |
Full User Agent String | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots) |
4. Baidu Spider
Baidu, the largest search engine of China is using a robot, known as the Baidu Spider to selectively crawl and index websites which are mainly in Chinese. It is built to cater to the features of the Chinese language and the manner customers use search engines.
User Agent | Baiduspider |
Full User Agent String | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html) |
6. DuckDuckBot
DuckDuckBot is the web crawler behind the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo. It emphasizes user privacy by not storing personal information or tracking user behavior.
User Agent | DuckDuckBot |
Full User Agent String | DuckDuckBot/1.0; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.html) |
7. Facebook Crawler
Facebook’s crawler, known as the Facebook Crawler or Facebook Bot, is responsible for gathering information about websites shared on the social media platform. It helps generate rich previews when links are shared.
8. Twitterbot
Twitterbot, the crawler of Twitter, reveals and indexes all the shared URLs as well. It makes sure that people get a preview of web content every time a link gets posted on a tweet.
9. Pinterestbot
Pinterestbot is a web crawler with the specific aim of extracting both images and other content from websites to display on Pinterest. However, it is essential to the users which are in search of some artistic stimuli.
10. LinkedInBot
LinkedInBot helps in feeding and positively influencing LinkedIn’s content reflecting by Content Crawling and Indexing of articles and other shared items.
11. SEMrushBot
SEMrushBot is an integrated part of the SEMrush toolset, which is a website performance tracker and SEO platform. It acquires information in return that gives user enough overall picture of their persona on any social media platform.
12. Majestic-12
Majestic-12 also known as MJ12bot is a decentralized-web-crawler that works with the SEO analytical tool known as Majestic SEO to gather link data that can help determine the authority of websites.
13. AhrefsBot
AhrefsBot is the identity of the web crawler and is associated with Ahrefs one of the most popular SEO tools of the digital platform. It is centered on gathering link and SEO data so that user competitors information can be offered.
Conclusion
In the complex world of the internet web crawlers are the thin threads that connect the overbearing quantity of information available. In the same way that Googlebot is a huge web crawler that can connect with other huge crawlers, so Pinterestbot is specialized and it Indexes, ranks and produces content that users will find useful. Learning these 14 typical web crawlers does reveal the mechanism behind the current web-based society.