How Does Google Work?
How does Google work and What does Google do?
For many of you, this will be relatively old news but it will still have some worth. For everyone fresh to the world of the SEO industry: let me clarify what Google does and how SEO strategies work.
Understanding how Google works will help you to develop a successful SEO strategy. Read on to find a straightforward and clear answer to how does Google work?
How does Google work?
All search engines, including Google, Bing, Safari etc., follow links. They track a link referring from one web page to another and are sometimes called a backlink.
Google consists of
- a crawler
- an index
- an algorithm.
The first step is:
The crawler follows the links on the web. It moves around the world wide web 24/7 and keeps the HTML version of every page in a giant database named the index.
This index is revised and updated every time the Google crawler reaches your website. If it finds newly created or modified published web pages, the current version of this page is saved. Making the crawler come to your site will depend on how much traffic you have and how often you modify and change your pages. This is why SEO experts always tell you to edit and add unique and original content to your site constantly. Always include blog posts on your site as it is a brilliant way to generate a backlink. Whether these are written by yourself or a guest piece they are important.
For Google to learn that your website exists, there first has to be a website linking already in the index linking to one of your pages. If the crawlers track that link, it will direct to the initial crawler session, and the first time your site is held in the index. Your website may emerge in Google’s search results from this point on as Google has the signal that your site is there and other domains have told Google that your post or page is an asset. This is called link juice which will pass from one site to another boosting it.
Google’s secret algorithm
Once your website has been indexed, Google can display it in the search results. The search engine attempts to match a specific search query with web pages that it has indexed. So when someone asks Google a question, it will display the pages it thinks will answer this.
But to do so, Google has a distinct algorithm that chooses which pages are exhibited in which order. Unfortunately, how this algorithm operates exactly is a secret and will always remain that way. No matter what SEO experts tell you, nobody knows exactly which elements determine the placement of the search results. But there is hope.
The algorithm isn’t fixed. It constantly alters with regular updates. The elements that specify the sequence and the significance of the different aspects modify frequently. Although the algorithm is private, Google does inform us which factors are influential. We don’t know how crucial, though we don’t know if Google shares all these factors with us. The only way we can learn and work it out is to test, experiment and study. This gives us confidence and a good idea of what Google considers necessary. We then need to combine these factors into our websites.
Search Results Pages
The term SERP’s means Search Engine Results Page Google will show roughly 7 or 10 links to different sites that match your search the best (according to Google). These results are called organic search results. If you click through to the second results page, you see more results. There are sometimes millions of pages. So if your website is any further down the results it is less likely to be seen. Climbing the results page and earning a top 10 spot on Google is what all SEO experts target. This is where most of your website traffic will come from. Getting on the first page of Google is a whole new level.
Usually, there are paid links above the first 10 links on the first page. You will see these at the top with ad links; They have been paid by companies to Google so their links are at the beginning when users search for a specific term. Fees for these ads differ significantly, depending on the popularity and demand of the keyword term. In addition to these organic and paid results, there are also a few other factors that you can find on Google’s search engine results page.
How valuable are links for search engines?
It’s essential to have a fundamental understanding of how Google and other search engines use backlinks in order to build correctly. The amount of links pointing to a page is used to decide how important that page is. So, the more links a specific site has, the more influential search engines think it is. But not every backlink is equal. You can get spammy links as well which will hinder your site.
Each site needs both internal referral links (from the same website) and outbound links or backlinks (from other websites) that can help with ranking your website in Google. Some backlinks are better than others, though. For example, links from websites with many incoming links are typically more meaningful and have higher authority than links from smaller websites with fewer incoming links.
The significance of links guides to active link building quite quickly. You will get free backlinks eventually but it needs to appear natural. As long as you gather valuable and logical backlinks, link building can be a significant part of your SEO method. But in the process, if you gather (or worse buy) untrustworthy backlinks, Google may penalise you for that. You should always check your backlink profile which you can do with many free and paid checker tools. This way you can assess which domain links are good and which are not or even broken. You need a certain amount of both dofollow and nofollow links. To help you figure out the proper strategy, we wrote an article guide that examines this.
Google and SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the method of optimising websites to make them occur in a high rank in the organic search results. To do so, SEO attempts to shape a website compatible with Google’s algorithm making it look like what Google likes. This data aims to provide online users with the best solution to their questions and the best experience.
