You might have heard the term before while reading articles about blog SEO. Blog spiders are pretty much a tool that search engines utilize in order to retrieve various information and data regarding a unique website. The spider’s job is to copy that blog or website’s content and store it in the search engine’s database. While they do this, they also record the links and in turn, forward them to other bots or spiders in order for them to create copies of the same content.

Needless to say, the process goes on and on, day in and day out. This is why the database of major search engines can have so much data. In fact, both Google and Yahoo have said that the daily amount of data stored in their databases rival that of the data contained within the US Library of Congress which is roughly around 150 million items.

Knowing how these spiders work and how they read and collect the information is the more complex side of basic SEO. These spiders are created to read your blog’s content the same way a person would read a newspaper. They start from left to right and if it finds a link that can be followed, it would make a record of that link and send another spider to copy everything that can be found on said link.

It’s a lot like a little army of information gatherers, in a sense. They follow every link and record everything that they encounter and it’s only safe to assume that if you have a link on your blog that a spider can follow, then it would surely go to it and do the exact same thing over and over again. Tough job, but someone’s got to do it.