User-agent: Definition, Usage & Importance for SEO - Holistic SEO

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This article is about the user-agent and its importance in SEO. A user-agent is a client-side application used to access a network service. It is sent in the header of a request to a server as a character string. It is important for the server to be able to distinguish people from machines, such as search engine crawlers. The user-agent can be used to deliver a suitable version of the website, check if the browser is up-to-date, and collect information for statistical purposes. It can also be used to distinguish people from machines, and to ask bots not to crawl certain areas of the website. Knowing what information the various Google Crawlers are using can help to set the browser to transmit the same identifier.