What Content Can Search Engines “See” on a Web Page?
Search engine crawlers and indexing programs are basically software programs. These
programs are extraordinarily powerful. They crawl hundreds of billions of web pages,
analyze the content of all these pages, and analyze the way all these pages link
to each other. Then they organize this into a series of databases that can respond
to a user search query with a highly tuned set of results in a few tenths of a second.
This is an amazing accomplishment, but it has its limitations. Software is very
mechanical, and it can understand only portions of most web pages. The search engine
crawler analyzes the raw HTML form of a web page. If you want to see what this looks
like, you can do so by using your browser to view the source.
Once you view the source, you will be presented with the exact code for the website
that the web server sent to your browser. This is what the search engine crawler
sees (the search engine also sees the HTTP headers for the page). The crawler will
ignore a lot of what is in the code. For example, search engines largely ignore
code, as it has nothing to do with the content of the web page.
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