A BOT is a software-designed algorithm that accesses a website as a human would and “reads” the contents of the site.

They help to index your website so that it can be discovered on Search Engines such as Google, Bing, etc.

In this article, we will discuss a specific type of BOT known as a CRAWLER. A CRAWLER’s job is to crawl through a website’s contents and gather data, such as text, links and images, referring to these as “Assets“.

These BOTS are designed to process information rapidly. While a human might take an average of 7 minutes to read an article, a BOT can do it in under 25 milliseconds.

Because the behaviour is designed to mimic human behaviour, you will often notice certain websites and pages often implement a “Are you a Robot?” test. These tests are meant to prevent BOTS from scraping or accessing specific pages.

BOTS and Meta Descriptions

For Search Engine Optimization (SEO), search engine BOTS rely heavily on meta descriptions. A meta description is a brief summary that helps the BOT understand the content of the page. The BOT compares this summary with the actual content and rates the page against similar topics from other sources. The highest-rated content is favoured in search results.

For example, let’s consider an article titled “15 of the Best Things to Do in Istanbul.” This article contains 1,227 words, excluding punctuation marks, spaces, and HTML tags. Including these, the article amounts to approximately 1,620 characters.

To a BOT, each character—whether a space, letter, or number—is processed as a unit of data, often referred to as a “bit,” “nibble,” or “byte.”

When a BOT visits the article, it looks for the SEO description, scans through the content, gathers images and text, and compares it to the SEO description. If the description closely matches the content, the page is positively rated.

If the description is unclear or missing, the BOT will try to generate one, which can result in a penalty for the page. A mismatch between the description and the content leads to further scrutiny and possible penalties.

For instance, if the description claims “Wonderful things in Istanbul” but the content is about “Hot chicks near you,” the page will be heavily penalized.

Conversely, if the description is “Hot chicks near you” but the content discusses Istanbul, the page might be blacklisted for clickbait.

The Importance of Efficient BOT Interaction

The effort expended by BOTS is understood in terms of the server load required to scrape and process pages. Search engines like Google have millions of pages to visit daily, so minimizing the time spent on each page is crucial for maintaining efficiency.

By making our pages easy for BOTS to index and ensuring that our meta descriptions accurately reflect our content, we can improve our SEO rankings and ensure that our articles are favourably rated.

The SLURP Meta Description

When using SLURP to create a page, category or menu, you will notice the “SEO Meta Description Box” when creating an article, or page.

This is where you enter the description of the article you are creating. More of this will be explained in “How The SEO Meta Description Indicator Works”.