How do search engines work?

If you are serious about driving organic traffic from any search engine, it is important to know how search engines rank websites.

For the purpose of this blog, we will use Google are our main search engine, however, other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo work very similar, so it is a great foundation to use for understanding how all search engines work.

Crawling and indexing the web

When a searcher types a keyword into a search engine like Google, that search engine will then scan an index of over a billion pages on the web to determine the best results to display based on the problem they are trying to solve.

The pages contained in this index comes from Google ‘crawling’ the internet. This process begins with Google sending out bots to scan billions of known URLs on the internet. Each bot follows links on these websites to discover other pages. After each page has been crawled, Google then analyses the text and non-text elements to identify what the page is about, before adding this information into its index.

Ranking Factors for Websites

Google determines the best results to show a user based on their complex search engine algorithms. Although Google doesn’t make the exact details of its algorithm public, they can be broadly grouped into the following categories:

Relevancy

The simplest, yet the most effective component of Google’s search algorithm is relevancy. If a person is searching for “buy black jumper online”, they expect to be presented with products and websites showcasing black jumpers. Google’s goal is to always provide its users with results that are closely related to their query.

By using the right keywords and user-friendly language, Google is able to scan all of the content in its index and find pages with content that is relevant to the user’s search query.

Authority

Authority and expertise matter, especially when it comes to the world wide web. Google uses this as a core ranking signal in its search engine algorithm. To determine domain authority, Google looks at the quantity and quality of pages linking back to that page.

Source: Online Marketing Gurus

When a page accumulates more backlinks, Google will start to see it as an authoritative source of information. However, keep in mind that quality always matters more than quantity.

Usefulness

Google wants to showcase useful pages at the top of search results. In other words, it wants content that is helpful and solves a user’s problem. Google measures usefulness based on how users interact with web pages. If users are spending a lot of time on a website and click through to one search result over another, Google will give that page a ranking on its results page.

Google continues to work on better connecting people with helpful information, and have recently launched a new updated algorithm called the “helpful content update”, which we explored in our last blog post.

At WebEagles, with our years of experience working with search engines, we understand what it takes to rank. We aim to stay up to date on all search engine updates and implement these best practices within our work. For more information, contact us on 1300 123 808.