Spider Trap

(sp d r trap) (n.) A condition of dynamic Web sites in which a search engine’s spider becomes trapped in an endless loop of code where a spider’s request for a page from a Web server is met with a the server’s request for an information input from the spider, which cannot provide information to the server as it is only collecting data for the search engine’s index. Spider traps are the result of poorly written cgi scripts and potentially can crash a server and/or prevent the spider from returning to a site.