Web Crawling : Definition, How it Works, and the Difference with Web Scraping – Web crawling is the process that allows a website to appear on search engines. This process is done with the help of a tool called a web crawler.
Neither the process nor the web crawler tool itself is known to anyone. Reporting from nubiseo.com, it even presents a number of functions that even play an important role in increasing the ranking of a website.
Therefore, the following article will discuss more about web crawling, starting from the understanding, how it works, and how it differs from web scraping.
What is Web Crawling?
Most people only rely on search engine optimization (SEO) in placing their website on the first page of Google’s search engine results page (SERP). In this process, there are actually other processes that also play an important role. One of the processes is web crawling.
Web crawling is the process by which search engines send a team of robots (crawlers or spiders) to search and scan content on web pages. Where this content can be articles, images, videos, or documents.
How Web Crawlers Work
A website cannot be found by search engines. Search engines must do crawling and indexing first to be able to display website content on their SERPs.
In terms of crawling, the web crawler starts its work based on a list of previously scanned page links from the sitemap of a website. From the list of links, he will find other links scattered in it. At that time, it will crawl to the latest links and the process will continue to repeat on the next link.
Even so, web crawlers are not arbitrary in crawling. There are three things that are usually considered so that the crawling process can run more effectively.
1. Page Relevance Level
Web crawlers determine which pages to crawl based on how important and relevant they are.
2. Regular Visit
The content on the internet is always changing every second. Either because it was updated, deleted, or moved to another place.
3. As Desired Robots.txt
The web crawler also determines which pages to crawl based on what robots.txt wants. So, before crawling to a website, the web crawler will check the robots.txt of that website first.
Differences Between Web Crawling And Web Scraping
Some people often mistake and equate web crawling with web scraping. At first glance, these two terms do sound similar. However, the two are actually different, both in terms of definition, focus and scope, goals, knowledge of the website, to the output.
1. Definition
By definition, web crawling is the process of reading and storing all content into a website for the purpose of archiving or indexing. While web scraping is the process of extracting data from a website into a new file format.
2. Focus and Coverage
The focus and scope of web crawling is greater because the scope is all pages and websites on the internet, while the scope of web scraping is only on a specific collection of data from a website.
3. Purpose
Web crawling aims to find and find URLs or links on the internet, while web scraping aims to generate data on a target website for further analysis.
4. Knowledge of the Website
Web crawlers don’t need to know the URL or domain they want to crawl because their goal is to find, find, and index those URLs. While web scraping knows in which domain the data will be taken from a website. this is as important as Blogger Seo Settings.
5. Output
The output of web crawling is a list of crawled URLs, while the output of web scraping is data fields such as product name, product price, and size.
Closing
Thus the article that discusses info about Web Crawling: Definition, How it Works, and the Difference with Web Scraping. Hopefully the article that we discussed this time can be useful and can help all readers in knowing the definition of web crawling. Thank you