How does Google work?
Good visibility on Google is now a cornerstone for almost every business. Search engines are one of the best sources for selling products and services. It is not only effective, but also a relatively o cheaper way of promotion than traditional marketing efforts.
Currently, there are several major search engines, but Google’s search engine leads the segment, so it’s where the vast majority of marketing activity is focused.
Since we are investing in Google search marketing, it is useful to know how it actually works. What are indexing robots? How often are pages indexed? Why is search engine optimization so important?
What is the purpose of search engines anyway?
The overriding goal of every search engine and every new search algorithm update is to show the most relevant answers to the user’s question.
When you type a phrase like “recipe for the best lasagna” into a search engine, what you expect above all is the following proven and good lasagna recipes. We don’t want to find bad recipes or an apple pie recipe.
But how does Google “know” which recipe is good? Well, the answer is simple – it doesn’t know. Google’s indexing robots certainly haven’t checked all the recipes personally 🙂
So how do they choose the best recipes? They are guided by other determinants that they can check and measure, such as the number of hits on the site, the overall authority of the cooking site, recommendations of the recipe by other sites or users.
This approach does not guarantee that the best lasagna recipes will appear under our query, but it certainly significantly increases the likelihood of showing a recipe of interest.
How are web search results created?
Google obtains knowledge from many sources – from scans of books, from public databases and – most importantly – from websites. Here we will discuss the last and most important for us (as SeoFly :)) source of knowledge.
Google’s search engine operates fully automatically and uses so-called indexing robots to collect information, which regularly crawl websites.
Indexing robots work in 3 stages.
The first stage is scanning (also known as crawling), which is looking for new or updated pages and saving them to a list for later processing. Google essentially finds the new website on its own, but to make sure that the crawler reaches all the subpages, you need to take care of things like internal linking and creating a sitemap.xml file.
The next stage is indexing, which means revisiting the pages previously added to the list. This stage is particularly important because this is when Google analyzes the content and information on the page. The information obtained by the indexing robots is stored in Google’s index, a huge database that stores data from more than 6 billion indexed websites.
Google indexes sites at different frequencies – sometimes a couple of times a day, sometimes once every couple of weeks. If the site has Google Search Console installed, you can easily check the last visit of Googlebot.
Read also: Changes to indexing statistics in Google Search Console. Are they for the better?
The final stage is the display of search results responding to the user’s query. It is at this stage that our site is set to a specific ranking position.
What makes up a site’s Google ranking position?
Unfortunately, there is no single and comprehensive answer to this question. Google is always guided by showing answers with the highest quality and best relevance. Many factors are taken into account, for example, location, user language, page load speed, quality and uniqueness of content and many, many other factors.
There are a number of known and certain factors that are important to Google, but through regular updates to the search algorithm, it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict what a site will rank.
Read also: Google algorithm update – December 2020
That’s why it’s so important to conduct SEO audits and have regular care from an SEO specialist who is versed in current search engine guidelines and changes. Effective optimization will ensure that Google will treat our site as the best answer to the user’s query.
Sources: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/basics/how-search-works
