Summary of my rental sites for 2005

OTA = Online Travel Agency, which means those sites that sell the booking and take the payment for you.
alexia s.
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Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 6:38 pm
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spiders

Post by alexia s. »

Hello Maisy,
I'm a bit dim too with computers. I think that spiders are automated searches that go all over the web; when they go into a site the site can't tell if it's a real visitor or an automatic one. If this is absurd maybe a techie will help us?
Best,
Alexia.
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paolo
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Joined: Thu Jun 17, 2004 1:18 pm
Location: Provence, France
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Post by paolo »

Maisy,

Sorry about the incomplete answer, I was just popping out.

Spiders are bits of code that are sent out by search engines to go from link to link around the web and report back what they found on their travels. Once they find your site by following a link to it, they will come back regularly to check on any changes you have made, and they will update the search engine's index accordingly.

The search engine's index is its repository of web pages that it knows about. This is only a proportion of the whole internet.

When you do a search on a search engine like Google, Google doesn't send a spider to the site you clicked on and return the information. It looks it up in the index that its spiders have built up. So the index is not always up to date, depending on how recently an engine's spider took a look at the site in question.

Spiders come around quite often. Your personal website's stats package should tell you how many times each spider (or bot), has come, and separate that from the human visitors you get. A counter on a listing site ad will not separate them, giving you a false idea of how popular the ad is.

The above is by no means accurate, just my layman's understanding of the situation.
Paolo
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