Web Crawler
Web ScrapingDefinition
A web crawler is a program that systematically browses the web by following links from page to page. Crawlers discover and index content across entire websites or domains.
How It Relates to CrawlForge
Web crawlers are distinct from scrapers in that they focus on discovery -- finding all the pages on a site rather than extracting specific data from a single page. CrawlForge provides crawl_deep for following internal links to a specified depth and map_site for generating a complete URL inventory of a domain.
These tools are critical for use cases like content migration, SEO auditing, and building comprehensive datasets where you need to process every page on a site rather than just known URLs.
Related CrawlForge Tools
Related Terms
Web Scraping
Web scraping is the automated extraction of data from websites. It involves programmatically fetching web pages and parsing their content to collect structured information.
Sitemap
A sitemap is an XML file that lists all the URLs on a website, along with metadata like last modification date and priority. It helps search engines and crawlers discover and index all pages efficiently.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a standard text file placed at the root of a website that tells web crawlers which pages they are allowed or disallowed from accessing. It is part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol.
Pagination
Pagination is the practice of dividing content across multiple pages. Handling pagination in web scraping means automatically navigating through all pages to collect complete datasets.
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