What is Googlebot?

Googlebot refers to the robotic crawler/spider used by Google for website indexing purpose. The robot crawls the Internet all the time collecting documents from various web sites and building a searchable directory to be used by Google’s search engine. Webmasters can restrict the availability of information to the spider by using relevant commands applied in file formats known as robots.txt. The same application may be achieved by addition of a meta tag in the format <meta name is equal to “Googlebot,” content is equal to “nofollow” /> on each web page. Googlebot detects this and invokes Web servers that are identifiable by user agent strings that contain “Googlebot” as well as host addresses that contain “googlebot.com”.

The advantage of Googlebot is that it only follows SRC and HREF links and discerns pages by gathering all the links it finds on every page. In view of this, fresh web pages should be connected to other pages that are known so that they can be located and then indexed. On the other hand, the limitation of Googlebot is that it uses a considerably huge quantity of bandwidth. This may cause various websites to go down temporarily or slow load time.