We all use Google as our search engine. But, how many of you actually know “how Google search engine works” and the working principle of it?
We don’t have to know how Google works to operate it. Google provides everything we want and is known as popular among all other search engines.
Like all search engines, Google follows a particular algorithm to give you the search result.
This is a complex thing and Google doesn’t share it with users. This is the secret to Google’s success. This algorithm helps Google to get relevant information from thousands of websites.
Google changes it frequently and tries to bring new changes to algorithms to make the search result more accurate.
Popular algorithms Google used before are Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Pigeon, Mobile, Rank brain and many more.
The rank brain became popular as it helped them to guess what you actually look for. So, all of these algorithms make Google a successful search engine.
Now we need to know the working principle of Google. There is nothing complicated to understand about working of this search engine. Here I am going to explain about various stages Google goes through, before giving you accurate result
How Google Search Engine Works – Indexing and Crawling:
The first thing Google does is to crawl websites and indexes its pages. Google uses spiders to crawl websites and read its contents.
This is a small program or bots that crawl the website to get information from a website. This crawling process begins with sitemap which is created by website owners.
A sitemap is a language understandable to these spiders and they follow these instructions to crawl to each page of your site and indexes it.
While these spiders crawl a site, they notice all pages and deadlinks on a website. In addition to it, spiders note down all external links connected with your website. All these information are important while ranking your site.
When they rank a website, Google considers many important factors like relevancy of website contents, number of backlinks, the freshness of content, etc.
When a website gets 4 links from external sites and another website 3 links. The site with 4 links is ranked higher if all links are of good quality.
After crawling, the next process is called indexing where search engine checks and search the existing database when a user enters a search term.
From this, we can understand that crawling and indexing are not instant processes. When crawlers find new web pages, Google indexes them to its database. This is why it can deliver the result faster.
So, make sure to index your web pages to Google index. Otherwise, it can’t appear in the search result.
So, crawling and indexing is two important steps of the search engine. Website owners can create a sitemap to make the job of search engine easy.
Also, there is a provision of recrawling your website if you can request for it and also hide any pages from Google using the robots.txt file.
There are tools for you to create a sitemap of your site like screaming frog, Write Maps Free, etc.
The Process of Ranking a Website:
Google ranking is very secretive as it won’t disclose how its algorithm works. There are more than 200 factors which affect page ranking.
Each time Google changes its algorithm, to make more accurate results.
When a user searches for something, Google searches its indexed database and according to its algorithm, the best pages will be listed as our search result.
Importance of page rank:
Page rank is one of the important factors that decide your page quality. Google considers it an important factor.
The main guiding factor of page rank is the number of incoming quality links.
Backlinks to your website decide its quality and Google will check all the backlinks to your website.
Links from authority sites will get extra benefits and need to avoid spammy backlinks. Spammy links can create a negative impact on your page rank.
Google Search Engine Algorithms:
The most popular algorithm Google now follows is called Rank Brain. It was introduced by Greg Corrado.
This algorithm works based on artificial intelligence. The main functions of this algorithm are to sort out relevant search results from thousands of search pages and give users an accurate search result in a short time.
This algorithm also can guess what users are searching for when they type words to search for something.
It will give suggestions to users about all popular search related to those keywords. This is how the brilliance of this algorithm really works.
It also made Google one of the most dependable search engine and many users now use Google, to search for everything they want.
There are some interesting steps that happen in this process. You must know how Google uses them as a factor, to provide better service. These are the steps Google follows:
1. Word analysis:
Word analysis is a simple thing you can easily understand.
When you enter a search term, Google uses some language model to analyze the words you enter in the index page. Here many processes happen like spelling correction, an extension of a particular word, etc.
Sometimes when we search for some generic term, a lot of suggestions comes up. If you want a specific search result, you need to enter specific search terms.
Even though your search term doesn’t match with the indexing pages, Google tries to show you the result with its synonyms.
For example, if you are searching for a generic word Pizza, you can see many Ads and knowledge graph about pizza in the search results.
But when you search for pizza hut, Google shows you more specific results for what you searched. This is how the advanced Google algorithm works.
2. Matching your search:
Google next tries to search for relevant results in their indexing page that matches with your search term.
They search web pages that match with your search term and also analyzes the frequency of keywords used in a webpage.
It doesn’t mean that you can get ranked your page on the top by stuffing your page with keywords.
This is a very old-belief that by including keywords so many times in your content, can help it to appear on the top of the page. The content should be relevant and fresh to impress Google.
3. Ranking relevant pages:
This is the main point where Google filters out only relevant search results to present you. Other than keywords there are many ranking factors according to Google.
There will be many relevant sites for the searched query. But Google only presents you the best out of them by checking its quality, content, freshness, user experience.
It always wants to give users the best experience. To achieve this goal, Google Algorithm is specially created to avoid spammy sites that are just created to rank better.
These types of pages won’t have anything in it other than some irrelevant content. To avoid such spammy sites, Google created its algorithm very strong so that such site get a penalty from it.
4. Considering context:
Google also check for past search history and your location while showing a relevant search result.
If you are searching Amazon from the United States, Google shows you amazon.com and if you are searching from India it will show you amazon.in.
Like that most of your search results are contextually based. Another example is, if you search for football and you stay in the US you will see the results of American football. If you live in anywhere else like the UK, the results will be about the Premier League.
Other than this, Google also shows you result based on your previous search history. This is another technology, Google developed through its algorithm.
It stores all your past search history in your Google account and shows you result based on it. When you just start to type letters, it will show similar suggestions based on your previous search history.
Also, you can filter out unwanted search result using Safe search facility. Like this, there are many setting changes you can make and get your result as you want.
5. Giving you an accurate result:
After checking all relevant results, Google will show you the required result.
In between there are so many filtering processes that happen and the final outcome will be the best pages.
When we consider search engine optimization, many factors are considered for ranking your page higher.
Some of them are very useful to implement because they can help a website to rank higher. Some others are very minor factors. Most importantly quality matters to Google than any other factors.
How to Improve the Page Rank of your Website:
Here are some tips you can follow to improve your website ranking. There are algorithms to decide the ranking of the website.
1. Follow the most recent SEO trends:
SEO is very important to make your site rank higher.
As the algorithm changes, SEO trends also change with it. So, you need to follow all the recent changes properly. There is a recent change in the algorithm that creates a huge response.
When a user searches about something, they can see the main answer to it from search result without checking the webpage. This is because of featured snippets.
A user who only want to know the result of the question he searched for, this new feature will help them. But with this change, there is a problem that users won’t click on the page to know about it. This will reduce website traffic.
Only if they want to know more, they will click on the webpage. The primary goal of Google is to improve user experience and they imply everything they want, to give users a better experience.
2. Keywords:
Know what your audience search, to get result related to your site topics.
Using specific words or sentence can help to appear your page on the top.
You can use tools to know more about those important keywords and optimize your content with keywords.
Google offers you free tools like Google keyword planner to help you in this process. Also, while using keywords don’t make it spammy by stuffing it with so many keywords. It can create a negative impact on your webpage.
3. Make your page secure:
Security is very important, and Google considers protecting users by providing only secure pages.
You can use HTTPS by changing HTTP so that users will trust your website and click on it. Google also consider HTTPS as an important ranking factor
4. Page speed:
This is another factor you can take care, to make your page rank higher. Check your site loading speed and improve it.
Most of the users don’t want to wait more than 3 secs to load a page. If you can optimize your page well to make it faster by reducing loading time less than 3 secs, it will be a plus point to your website
5. On page and Off page SEO:
There are many optimization factors on your page and outside it. Optimize your page content for search engine and also make sure to optimize every technical aspect of the site.
6. Quality backlinks:
Another important factor is the number of backlinks. While checking backlinks, quality is very important than its quantity.
According to Google, quality backlinks is a very important factor you need to consider. Check link authority and disavow low-quality backlinks to protect your webpage from losing its quality.
Final Words:
Google is a changing platform and it is very simple to adopt new changes if you follow the latest trends. This is a guide that gives you all the process that happens with Google search engine.
Crawling, indexing and ranking are the main processes that happen in this search engine. These are not an instantaneous process.
Google does this in advance and gives you a search result from indexed results.
To give better user experience, Google adopts to new changes and technologies to its searching process, to get the most accurate result. Google knowledge graph is one such change. Now you don’t have to use Google without knowing its working principle.