Who's on line? Guest Vs Spider

[Bhyde]

Hello,

Firstly apologies if I have posted this in the wrong section!

I am a total newbie at zen-cart! The person who designed my site thru zen-cart is off on maternity leave so I am still learning all the ropes!

Can someone please explain (in dummy terms) what it means when I see SPIDER in the who's on line section.

I have googled this term but most of the discussions around this are far too technical for me!
A guest is I am assuming just a guest browsing thru my site...right?

But what's a SPIDER?

[mprough]

A spider is a search engine crawler, as opposed to a real live visitor they crawl you site's pages for indexing and ranking.

~Melanie

[Bhyde]

Thanks Melanie!

So they are a good thing...

[Steven300]

It's something search engines use to scan websites so they know what website addresses to put in their results pages. They will "crawl" through your pages every now and again by following the links they find, and see how useful your website will be to the people using the search engines. They are good because you want them to put your web address into their search engines.

[mprough]

Thanks Melanie!

So they are a good thing...

Yes a Good thing

~Melanie