How Does Google Work?

Over the years, we’ve seen Google grow in popularity and functionality. Despite its level of exponential growth and numerous changes, its primary purpose is still clear and simple: To help point users to what they seek to find on the internet, and that’s where Google’s search engine stands out. You’re probably asking now; “how does Google work?”

Well, Google’s search engine, when looked at, is technically complex.

The search engine is said to take thousands of different factors into consideration as it works towards figuring out what should go where.

As expected, only very few people understand the real working process of Google’s search engine. At Digital Movers we help our clients better to understand how Google works and help them optimizing their website through SEO.

The good news, however, is that this topic is easy to understand. You don’t need to be scared of the very numerous factors involved, because you don’t need to know all. In this video the Google (2019) explains you more about how Search works exactly in dept:

Here in this article, we will take you through the basics as well as show you how to go about ranking higher on Google and bringing in more web traffic.

What Google Does

For every search query you use on Google, there are usually hundreds of thousands of webpages with related information on the internet. Google begins the whole process of trying to figure out what information to show you long before you even begin typing, and of course, it is guided by its commitment to showing you only the best and most relevant information to your search. Here, take a look at some of the things that Google does to ensure that you get satisfactory information in all your searches.

Crawlability

In this technical SEO course, we’re going to talk a lot about crawlability. Crawlability has to do with the possibilities Google has to crawl your website. There are a few ways that a crawler can be blocked from your website. If the website or a page on your website is blocked, you’re saying to Google’s crawler, do not come here. You won’t turn up in the search results in most of these cases.

Crawling and Indexing

Forget the big words you’d probably see all over the internet. What crawling and indexing simply means is the ability of Google to organize contents of the web so that the most relevant ones get shown first for every search. The fact is that even before you begin to type, Google already organized information all webpages in its search index. This index can be linked to a library, only that in this case, it contains far more information than all the world’s libraries even when put together.

There are some ways that you can prevent Google from crawling or indexing your website and in most cases you won’t turn up in the search engine.
First of all, before crawling your website, the crawler will take a look at the HTTP header of your page. This HTTP header contains a status code. If this status code says that a page does not exist, Google will not crawl your website. The second way to prevent Google from crawling your website is through the robots.txt file. You can block the crawler for going to specific web pages. If the robots meta tag on a specific page blocks that specific search engine from indexing, Google will crawl that page but will not add it to its index.

Search Algorithm

This is one of the essential characteristics of Google’s search engine. In simple terms, it represents the instant matching of your search by Google. Usually, within a fraction of seconds after each search, Google’s search algorithm goes into action, sorting through hundreds of billions of webpages grim its Search index, finding the most useful and relevant results for your search and presenting them to you in an understandable manner.

Useful Responses 

To help get you close to what you are looking for as quickly as possible, Google adopts a unique pattern to present results in useful and understandable formats. That is, depending on the information you seek, results can come in the form of a map with directions, text, videos, and images. Google is still constantly evolving by adopting new ways to present information.

Rigorous Testing

The team of engineers at Google never stops testing new models. It conducts thousands of experimental from time to time, finding new possible improvements that will enhance your experience during searches. The company understands that they have the power to always make your search better, and they are exploiting on that power daily.

How to Rank Higher in Google’s Search Results

Having understood some of the important things that Google do, let’s delve deeper into understanding how google works and explain you more about the things you can do to help your website rank higher on Google’s search results. Bear in mind that the clicks your website can generate are highly dependent on your search result ranking. Take a look at these strategies that can help.

Identify Google SEO Trends

Staying ahead of your competitors involve consistent work. One of the most important steps is the identification of SEO trends. You will need to always keep up with changes going on in Google as to how pages are ranked and how search results are delivered. Google makes these updates almost on a daily basis, and the earlier you find out about them, the easier it is to go ahead of your competitors in search ranking. One of the most recent SEO trends that Google is paying very close attention to is the mobile-first optimization. There are tons of others, but you need to pay careful attention to know them and leverage them.

Identify the Most Likely Queries That Your Audience Use

In the past, the top results delivered by search engines are based entirely on how pages include those exact words used as a search query. Today, however, algorithms have gotten more advanced, but search queries and keywords are still very important.
So, as you look to optimize your site, adopt the use of keyword tools to check what your audience is most likely to search for.

Switch to HTTPS

Today, security has become even more important to internet users. Most users want to be sure about the security of their information before using them online. Hence, Google is becoming increasingly concerned about it too.

Users want to be guaranteed of the privacy of their online activities, and the security of their personal information. Based on this, Google has incorporated the use of HTTPS as a ranking factor. The term is used to describe sites that work on the encryption of user data to make the information of each visitor as secure as possible.

Although this update, when Google announced it in 2014, was announced as a “lightweight signal,” we’ve seen pages from HTTPS domains gain higher exposure in search results over the years. So, you need to do something about the security of your site as soon as possible.

Improve Your Page Speed

Google’s page speed benchmark reports that the bounce probability of a page increases by 32% when its load time increases from one to three seconds. So, simple logic shows that you could be losing so much traffic if your site loads in more than a second.

Earn Quality Backlinks

By now, you should already know that Google takes the backlink profile of your site very serious in its ranking algorithm.

This means that sites with a higher number of links would rank better in search results. However, you must understand quality is more important than quantity as far as backlinks are concerned.

Earn your links from sites that are reputable and authoritative if you want to come anywhere close to achieving the rankings you desire. At Digital Movers we can help you with building your link profile and outsource your linkbuilding to us.

Site structure

Google is a search engine and has certain ways to crawl your website. The structure of your website not only helps Google finds information more easily but it also helps with the experience for your users. It is most important that users can find your products and services easily, so you’ll have to help them navigate your website in an easy way. We always advice our clients to keep your website in silos and this means that we would like to create bundles of information that link to each other without going out of that silo. This helps users and also the search engine to better understand what content/services or products are where.

There are a couple of reasons why site structure is so important for changing your rankings.

First of all like we mentioned above already it helps Google to beter understand your website. You should help the search engine to navigate easily through your website and guide him to the right information. Secondly, there is a chance that you will compete to yourself for the same keyword when you don’t have a good site structure. When you are writing a lot about different aspects of PPC for example and you don’t tell Google which post is more important, Google is not able to tell which page is the most important. It is therefore extremely important that you have a good internal linking structure and taxonomy structure to do this. Taxonomies stands for a group of things that have something in common.

We also call it silos as mentioned above. The default taxonomies in a CSM like WordPress are categories and tags. If you are wondering how a good site structure may look like here’s an example:
1. Homepage
2. Categories or sections
3. Subcategories
4. Individual pages and posts

Conclusion

Recently the periodic table of SEO 2019 has been released. With this table it is more easy to understands how google works. In a nutshell it comes down to three basic things to get your website rank higher:

• Architecture – Can search engines access all the pages of your site, read the content and are the important pages near the root of your website?! Mobile, desktop and speed are at this point the most important for ranking higher in the search engines.
• Contents – Do you have the right keywords and content on your site in the right order without repeating them so often that you sound like a robot? Are you providing relevant articles for your audience as well?
• Relevance – Do other websites link to you? If this is the case, these are good quality links and the authority of the linking website is extremely important. Don’t focus on quantity but in quality.

Despite sounding pretty straightforward, the question “how does Google search work?” Is a bit more complex than a lot of people understands. That’s basically because Google does not rest on updating its algorithm to deliver the best to users. So, the best way to achieve high rankings is to stay on top of all updates and keep focusing on your architecture, content and relevancy. While this may require more effort, the result of staying ahead of your competitors is well worth it.