Search engines basically depend on the web crawlers to assemble information from the web. In this way, crawlers alone have generated an enormous amount of web traffic towards the websites. If crawling was ever unethical then the whole web world would not exist and people would not Google everything. The purpose of web crawling services is to index the web and gather the information for different business requirements. However, there is a very thin line that describes the crawling process as ethical and unethical. Every website has information via a robots.txt file in terms of what information can be crawled and what cannot be, and if the professional follows the robots.txt then it is an ethical process.
Therefore, web crawling services means to extract the content from the web pages in a programmed manner as opposed to manually exploring each web page in the browser. The requests made by the browser-agent to the target server, hosting the web page, is likely to the way a bot hits a page to extract the content. Here are some thumb rules that determine the ethical process of web crawling.
- txt – It is considered as a filter cum consent form that one needs to abide by if they intend to crawl the site. It lets you know about the URLs that can or cannot be crawled. And thus, even the Google bot is not able to crawl a web page that has been blocked unless the site is concerned with that page’s SEO.
- Public content – Keeping in mind the copyright policy of “crawl only public content”. If the web professional is crawling the web content to duplicate the same content on another website then have a good luck.
- Terms of use – Before proceeding with web crawling services, it is important to check out the terms of use of a website.
- Authentication-based sites – Some sites require authentication before their content is actually accessed and commonly, most of them would neglect to crawl because they want their websites to be logged in manually only.
No comments:
Post a Comment