Google Search is a fully automated search engine. It uses special software called web crawlers that explore the internet to find new pages. Most of the pages that appear in Google Search results aren’t manually added. These crawlers discover and add them automatically.
This guide will explain how the search engine works, especially for your website. Knowing this can help you fix issues that may stop Google from finding and indexing your pages. It will also help you understand how to make your site show up better in search results.
Important Notes
Before we dive in, keep these things in mind:
- Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl or rank your site higher. If someone claims otherwise, it’s not true.
- No guarantees: Even if your website follows all of Google’s rules, there’s no promise that your pages will always show up in the search results.
How Search Engine Works: The Three Stages
Google Search works in three stages, but not all pages go through all of them. Here’s a breakdown of how search engine works:
- Crawling: This is the process of finding web pages. Google uses bots, called Googlebot, to visit websites and collect information about their content.
- Indexing: Once a page is crawled, Google tries to understand what it’s about by analyzing the text, images, and other media. This information is stored in a large database called the index.
- Serving search results: When someone searches on Google, the system looks through the index to find pages that match the search query. Google then shows the best results based on its algorithms.
Crawling: Finding Web Pages
Crawling is the first step in Google’s search for new and updated pages on the internet. Google doesn’t have a central list of all web pages, so it constantly searches for new content. This is called URL discovery.
Some pages are already known to Google because it has visited them before. Other pages are discovered through links from other websites. For example, if a new blog post is linked from a popular website, Google might find it by following that link. Additionally, website owners can submit a sitemap, which is a list of all their pages, to Google.
Once Google discovers a new URL, it sends Googlebot to visit the page. Googlebot decides how often to visit websites, which pages to crawl, and how many pages to fetch from each site. It also avoids overloading a website by adjusting its speed based on the website’s response. If a site has errors, like an HTTP 500 response, Googlebot will slow down.
However, not all discovered pages are crawled. Some might be blocked by the website’s robots.txt file, which tells Google which pages it can or cannot visit. Other pages may not be accessible because they require a login.
When Googlebot visits a page, it processes JavaScript just like your browser does. This is important because some websites use JavaScript to load content, and Google needs to see that content in order to index it.
Indexing: Understanding Web Pages
After a page is crawled, Google tries to understand its content. This is called indexing. Google looks at the text, images, and videos on the page, as well as key elements like the <title> tag and alt attributes.
During indexing, Google also checks if a page is a duplicate of another page already found. If there are duplicates, Google groups them together and chooses a canonical page—the one that will show up in search results. The other pages in the group are called alternate versions and might show up under special circumstances, like when someone searches on a mobile device.
Google also gathers other important information during indexing, like:
- The language of the page.
- The country the content is relevant to.
- How easy the page is to use.
This data is stored in the Google index, a large database spread across many computers. However, not all crawled pages are indexed. Google may skip pages if they have issues like low-quality content or if the website’s metadata blocks indexing.
Serving Search Results
When someone types a query into Google, the system looks through the indexed pages to find the best match. Google then ranks the pages and shows the ones that are most relevant to the search query.
Google’s ranking system is fully automated and does not accept payments to rank pages higher. The ranking is determined by hundreds of factors, including the user’s location, language, and device (desktop or phone).
For example, if you search for “bicycle repair shops,” Google will show local businesses near you. But if you search for “modern bicycle,” you might see images of bicycles instead.
Sometimes, even if a page is indexed, it might not appear in search results. This can happen if the content isn’t relevant to the user’s search, the quality of the content is low, or the page’s meta tags prevent it from showing up.
Staying Updated
Google is constantly improving its search algorithms. To stay updated on changes and improvements, you can follow the Google Search Central blog.
