How does Google work?
If for you, the functioning of Google is: a mystery, a puzzle, Digital Marketing Agency Mohali something rather vague… You’ve come to the right place!
When you are an Internet user, everything seems quite simple to us. We use Google without asking too many questions about the origin of the results, type a query in the Google search engine and hop, in a fraction of a second, a multitude of results appear. We just have to find our answer there. On the other hand, behind the most use search engine in France, hides a big well-oil machine.
When I type a query in the search bar how does it rank websites? How to stand out on the web?
In short, the central question is: how does Google work?
In this article, we will talk about the 3 main steps that will allow you to better understand how Google works.
Step 1: Exploration
Google is constantly crawling the web looking for new web pages and pages that have been update . This first “exploration” phase is called “ crawling ”.
How does Google crawl the web?
He and search engines use computer programs . Websites are not visit by humans, they are robots. Google uses “ Googlebot ”, this is the generic name given to Google’s crawler . Have you ever heard of “Spiders” or “Crawlers”? These are names given to Google’s crawlers.
Moreover, two “genres” of robots will browse the web pages. Each of them simulates the behavior that an Internet user might have when visiting your page/website: one simulates a computer visit while the other explores the mobile version.
How to help Google find a website?
We can facilitate the work of robots in different ways:
- Declare your website. It is possible to “declare” your website to search engines with a xmlfile . It is a file in which we give information that we consider important about the pages of a website and what they contain. This file helps Google crawl a site more efficiently.
- Use the robots.txt file. It is also a file, but it tells crawlers which URLs are accessible. On the other hand, this file does not block the indexing of a page.
- Submit new pagesto Google via the Google Search Console .
- Always link one page to anotherto avoid having an “ orphan page ” and breaking a robot’s path.
Step 2: Indexing
Second step in the process, indexing is the phase where Google officially recognizes your existence . If your site is not “index”, Digital Marketing Agency Mohali then you have no chance of being visible on search engines.
The robots will analyze your website : its content , its construction , the texts , the images, the videos. To best analyze your website, robots need to understand and interpret your content .
What are you doing ? What do you sell ? Who are you ?
How do robots understand a website?
Google index
All the information that the robots have collect while passing through your site will then be record in the Google index . This “index” is comparable to the catalog of a library which lists all the books store there. All these books have different characteristics: date of publication, subject, type, aesthetics, author… In the catalog, this information is list to help the librarian advise the reader. Digital Marketing Agency Mohali the same goes for Google. It uses the information it has record on each page to select what will correspond to the request of the Internet user.
Google uses this index when it needs to display results following a query. This is explain to you in the next step.
Step 3: Ranking
Will Google recommend you to its users?
Here we are at the last step. That of the classification , which is also called “ ranking ”.
We said it just above, Google allows you to appear in search results only if it deems it relevant. And the requirement will be all the more important to appear on the first page.
What happens when I make a request to Google?
When you type a query in the Google search engine, 3 things happen:
- Google analyzes your need and tries to better understand what is the intention behind your search
- When Google identifies the results in its index corresponding to your query
- Google ranks the results in order of relevance and displays a result page, it is also called the SERP (Search Engine Result Page)
In other words, to respond to a query, Google queries its friend the index, makes a selection and offers the results it deems most relevant.
The Google Algorithm
The relevance of the result is determine by the Google algorithm.
What is Google’s algorithm based on?
There are more than 200 criteria taken into account by Google to rank a page. You have to know that we don’t know them all. This is a well-kept secret by Google!
Here are some of the criteria taken into account by the algorithm to evaluate the relevance of a website:
- site relevance to search
- quality of content and use of keywords
- site loading speed
- geographical area of the user
- user language
- responsive design
- medium use (is it on pc, tablet, mobile?)
- page update frequency
- structure and tree structure of the page or site
- tags : meta-description, title tag, Hn tag, Meta Robots, alt attribute for images
- security (https protocol)
- site authority
- internal and external links
All this work is complicate by the fact that the algorithm evolves very (really very) often. For Google, the objective is to always better meet the expectations of its users and to offer them the highest quality content possible. Digital Marketing Agency Mohali it also adapts to our new ways of writing queries (eg asking questions) and our new habits (eg voice searches).
You will probably have understood that it is at the ” ranking ” stage that we see the performance of the natural referencing of a website.