yahoo spider?

[lunamoth]

I just discovered the "viewing who's online" function of the website and note that there are often several listed as "yahoo spider." Kind of creepy, just wondering what that is.

lunamoth

[I, Brian]

Don't worry about it - it's nothing harmful at all.

It's a search engine spider - in this sense, a "spider" is just a piece of software whose task is to "crawl" the "web", clicking through links and recording informaton about the pages it finds.

With Yahoo, MSN, and Google, their "spiders" frequently crawl this site, so that they can keep a fairly up-to-date record of CR, and return the information it finds on their search results for when people search for related subjects.

Search engine traffic is the main way that people find this site - they type in search phrases about religious subjects, and in a large number of these, CR shows up, precisely because the search engines have spidered those individual pages and determined them to be of use in reference to the searchers' query.

Hope that helps.

[lunamoth]

It does! Thank you.

[I, Brian]

No problem.

[Bandit]

CR is definately getting spiders. it is linked and popping up in a lot of my studies and when it pops me back to CR I kind of laugh. It happened like 3 times in one day.

[I, Brian]

Sounds good to me.

Part of my job is actually involved in trying to help content be indexed and ranked by search engines, so I've done a little of that here.

Just need to add more content - but soon.

[Postmaster]

CR is the future of religious studies all over the world



Brian will be made a religious icon

[lunamoth]

Is it my imagination or has anyone else noticed the high number of Spiders visiting here lately. Seems like there's been almost a hundred every time I look. Maybe I, Brian has somehow made the site more visible/connected to the search engines?

Just curious.
lunamoth

[I, Brian]

Think Yahoo! are just getting aggressive on the indexing of web content - not a concern at all.

[lunamoth]

Originally Posted by I, Brian

Think Yahoo! are just getting aggressive on the indexing of web content - not a concern at all.

What? Me worried? Nno, I'm not (tic tic) afraid of spiders (tic).

lunamoth

[InLove]

Spiders? Yes, there is a "granddaddy" weaving a beautiful web on my patio. Hope he (or she) catches some of those pesky flies! I have decided to name him "Yahoo". What was the question?

InPeace,
InLove

[InLove]

Okay--LMAO! I just was on the Mad Lib Thread, which mentions jelly beans quite often. As I started to log out, I looked up at the top of the window, and there was an ad for jelly bellies!!

Is this part of what the "spiders" are all about?

Still laughing....

InPeace,
InLove

[alexa]

Nope. In Quick Links, Miscellaneous, you have the option Who's on line. There you can find all kind of spiders.

I'm not afraid of spiders, either. *said alexa looking around carefully* I took the broom to clean up a bit.

[I, Brian]

The ads at top are sort of served by the Google media-bot spider - it tries to figure what a page is about, and then try to serve up ads based on that page content.

[InLove]

Hi, all--Peace--

Thanks, Brian for the explanation about the googlespiders--I knew that must be it (preponderance of evidence sort of thing).

However, I do have another "spider" question (and thanks, Alexa, for bringing this to my attention):

Originally Posted by Alexa

In Quick Links, Miscellaneous, you have the option Who's on line. There you can find all kind of spiders.

Since Alexa told me about this, I have attempted to go there several times (logged in, of course). But it has only worked once or twice--most of the time it does not. Any reason why?

(not that I am afraid of spiders or anything....)

InPeace, (and I admit, in ignorance at times),
InLove