ECI: Search Engines & Robots
Easy CSV Importer allows users to active some automated procedures. They include the ability to import data or create posts using data already imported. This post explains a little about the automation and how it works but is mainly about how Search Engines & Robots effect Easy CSV Importer.
Please note, ECI does not interact with or prevent search engines from crawling your blog. It simply checks what or who the current visitor is and adapts to prevent certain things from happening to protect your site.
How Scheduled/Automation Is Triggered
Easy CSV Importer has more of an incremented “Next Task” time rather than a schedule with a detailed future of events. Something called Speed Profiles allows us to configure our project so that ECI will wait a specific amount of time before triggering another event. This gives the appearance of a schedule. I give this the term “Event” because many things can happen during it depending on your project settings. An event is when ECI processes a sequence of arguments that check your projects various setting then it decides what to do, if anything.
How Events Are Triggered
When WordPress loads, it needs to load your theme and all plugins. A visit to every page requires, the theme and all plugins to be loaded. Even if they have loaded on a previous page, it all happens again. A plugin author can add the ability for something special to be triggered or actioned. It may be something very small, it may not do anything at all. We use a WordPress function named add_action and this uses various hooks to trigger actions at specific times.
ECI adds an action to be done during every time a page is loaded. It does not cause the page loading to slow down because the action function hardly does anything, at least until you add projects to your installation of Easy CSV Importer. The data import and post creation may happen.
So, in short ECI Events are triggered by visitors/users/you changing pages on your blog.
Search Engines & Robots
The loading of a page, triggers WordPress actions, created by plugin authors or themes. This is the case in ECI and so when a search engine spider or bot crawls your website, each page load will trigger ECI to check if any actions need to be taking. This entire process has been nicknamed an event in the ECI plugin.
By default, some search engines are prevented from triggering Easy CSV Importer events. ECI has to check the current HTTP_USER_AGENT to achieve this. The plugin contains a coded array of possible crawlers so that you can block any that you want.
See file easy-csv-importer.php, line 15 for a list of crawlers, add any you need to block,
$eci_crawlers = array( ‘google’, ‘yahoo’,'msn’,'lycos’ );
Possible Effects
The negative effects can be avoided, by understanding the tools I have provided you and understanding how Speed Profiles work. The positive effects may depend on your point of view and exactly what your trying to achieve.
- The crawling of hundreds of pages on your blog, could trigger many events. However, this would only be the case if one of your projects Speed Profiles incrementing time is very low i.e. seconds rather than many minutes. You may want this to happen, so that posts are created without people visiting your blog. In most cases this is not a good thing, you have a search engine crawling your blog, ECI possibly generating more posts that may be crawled by the spider or robot. Depending on how the crawler behaves, this could be a long loop/cycle that needs to be monitored. Some users want this to happen but have the server to handle it, some do not have a server that will allow this stress.
- If you do not configure Speed Profiles to allow processes of events close together, allowing all robots/crawlers will not have a negative effect because processing an event is not allowed to happen too soon after one has already complete.