How Search Engines work (Crawling, Indexing and Ranking)

How do search engines work? Search engines have three main functions:

Crawl: Search the web for content, look for code / content for each URL they find.

Index: Save and organize content found while crawling. Once a page is in the code, it will be displayed as a result of related queries.

Ranking: Provide pieces of content that give the best answer to a searcher’s query, i.e. the results are ordered as the most relevant or least relevant.

Search engine crawling

Crawling is the process of discovery in which search engines send a group of robots (called crawlers or spiders) to find new and updated content.

Fetching a few web pages by google bots and then for finding new URLs following the links on those web pages too. By following this path of links, the crawler can find new content and add it to a code called Caffeine, the largest database of URLs that can be found – and then the content in that URL can be retrieved when a searcher searches for information.

Search engine index

The largest database of all the content they find and is large enough to serve searchers where Search engines process and store the information

Search engine ranking

During researching, search engines search for their code for the most relevant content, and then that content in the hopes of solving the searcher’s query. Sorting search results appropriately is called ranking. In general, you may think that a website is in a high place, believing that the most relevant is the site for search engine query.

You can block search engine crawlers from one or all parts of your site or instruct search engines to avoid storing certain pages in their code. If you want your content to be found by searchers, first make sure it is accessible and coded by crawlers. Otherwise, it’s as good as invisible.

Crawling: Can search engines find your pages

As you have just learned, making sure your site is crawled and coded is a prerequisite for displaying in SERPs. If you already have a website, it’s a good idea to start by looking at how many pages your index has. It will give you some great insights on whether Google is crawling and finding all the pages you like, and there is nothing you can do about it.

There are a few possible reasons why you’re not showing up anywhere in the search results

• Your site is new and has not crawled yet.
• Your site is not linked from any external websites.
• Navigating your site makes it difficult for a robot to crawl effectively.
• Your site has some basic code called Crawler Directives that block search engines.
• Your site Google has been fined for spammy tricks.

Indexing: How do search engines describe and store your pages

Once you have confirmed that your site is crawling, the next line of business is to make sure it can be coded(indexed). That’s right- just because a search engine finds and crawls your site does not mean it will be stored in their index. In the previous section on crawling, we discussed how search engines find your webpages. The index is where the pages you find are stored. Once a crawler finds a page, the search engine returns it as a browser. In doing so, the search engine analyzes the contents of that page. Here all information is stored in its index.

Ranking: How do search engines rank URLs?

How do search engines ensure that if someone types a query into the search engine, they get the appropriate results? That process of ranking or sorting search results is more relevant to a particular query.

What do search engines like?

Search engines always want the same thing: to provide useful answers to the searcher’s questions in the most effective forms. If that is true, why does SEO appear to be different now than in previous years?

Stock links play a role in SEO

Connections, two things can be said. Backlinks or “inbound links” are links from other websites that point to your website, while internal links are links to your own site that point to your other pages (on the same site).

Links have historically played a major role in SEO. Search engines need help finding which URLs are more reliable than others to help determine how to rank search results. Calculating the number of links pointing to any site helped them to do this.

Backlinks work very similar to real life WoM (word-of-mouth) recommendations

Content plays a role in SEO

It will be of no use to them if the linkers do not guide the seekers in anything.  If search engines are answer engines, the content is the way the engines provide those answers.

Rankbrain

Ranking is the machine learning component of Google’s main algorithm. Machine learning is a computer program that improves its predictions over time through new observations and training data. In other words, it always learns, and because it is always learning, search results must constantly improve.

Conclusion

What does this mean for SEOs?

As Google constantly improves its rank piece to promote the most relevant and useful content, it should focus more on fulfilling the seeker’s purpose than ever before. Provide better information and experience for searches that can land on your page, and you’re taken a big first step to perform better in a ranking world.

Engagement measurements: contact, reason or both. In Google rankings, engagement measurements are mostly partial and partly causal.