Spider paths are how the spider will crawl through your website. Generally, your site map will serve as your spider path. If you have a simple site map, then it will be easy for you to link to all the pages on your website. However, you must understand that spiders can get blocked as well. This is like a hiker who is following a trail that may suddenly end—they may or may not go back the way they came, meaning spiders may not index your page at all! If linking to another page requires anything more than following an HTML anchor tag, the link may not be visible to the spider—this means JavaScript, Flash, and frames. Bottom line: if your page is dependent on these resources to work, it is okay for a user but not a spider. Also, if you want to avoid hurting your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, also make sure that your HTML is correct, as spiders don’t look kindly on bad HTML.
Now there’s the problem of having the spider indexing your site continuously. Just because they’re indexing now doesn’t mean they won’t desert you in the future. One thing to avoid is long, dynamic URLs. If your URL is more than 1,000 characters, they’ll skip the page. Also, for best search engine optimization (SEO) results, avoid repetition in your URLs. For example, sites sometimes use session identifiers to see who is viewing their page, but spiders dislike the repetitive content in the URL as a result.
