Have you ever wondered how search engines work so quickly and show you the most relevant answers to your questions? Understanding this process will ease your SEO journey.
Google Search can be categorized into three essential stages
Google uses its software known as web crawlers (google bots, Spiders) to crawl through more than 1.7 billion websites. These crawlers regularly explore the web and find sites to index on their search index.
When crawlers visit webpage to webpage they render that information and store them. This procedure is called indexing.
We can say that the Google search index is the largest library in the world. According to Google, the size of the search index surpass 100,000,000 gigabytes. It contains billions of web pages and it grows day by day.
The objective of Google is to display the most relevant and highest quality result to the search queries.
To show the results to search queries, Google uses a ranking system. For this Ranking system, they consider various factors like the location of the user, device of the user, language, etc…
The search algorithm can be identified as one of the fundamentals of computer science.
The procedure search engines use to locate specific data among billions of data is called Search Algorithm. So google use a search algorithm to rank its content and deliver the most relevant and highest quality results to search queries.
There are more than 1.7 billion websites available on the internet. So when you search for something online it is impossible to search all those websites’ live versions in a fraction of a second. So when you search for something on the search engine you search the google search index (not the live version of the internet).
Google protects its internal secrets with tight privacy. There is a reason for this. If someone got to know about how search algorithms work, they can easily manipulate algorithms to show their information on the Search Engine Result Page(SERP).
But Google provides us with information about search algorithms and major updates through their official communication channels.
Google uses over 200 ranking factors in its algorithm. According to google following are the main 5 key factors that they take into consideration when it comes to ranking.
To deliver the most relevant results it is important to understand what actually user trying to find and the meaning and intent behind search queries. This factor helps google to return the exact results when users type a few keywords and search.
It took more than 5 years to develop this system and according to google this improved search results by more than 30%.
The second most important thing is the relevance between the search query and the Content. The basic example is when your web page contains the same keywords as users’ search queries, your content becomes relevant.
Google is focusing on offering the best content to its users.
After google sort the relevant content it will look for the best results. To find the best results googles system look for content that demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. These 3 factors will determine the content quality.
Usability of the content is the 4th key factor in ranking. When your content is more mobile-friendly and loads quickly Google will assign you to a higher rank on SERP.
Google will consider search setup when delivering content. If you prefer Japanese language results, Google will prioritize the content in the Japanese language.
And information such as your past search history, and location will be considered in this stage to give more unique and personalized results. So if you and your friend search “Shoes” at the same time at the same location, there is a high possibility of getting two different results
Google needs to improve its algorithm and update them regularly to provide the most suitable results to search queries. With new data,
Sometimes google make major updates call “Core Updates”. These updates resulted in improving the rankings of some websites. At the same time, some websites lost their rank in SERP.
So it is important to keep an eye on these updates.
On November 17th, 2021 Google announced that they will release a broad core update through their official Twitter account of google search central.
As usual, Google didn’t provide much information about this core update. But said that they are focusing on content quality and EAT factors*explained in (content quality). It is said that this update is more focused on removing the spam results from SERP.
Typically it takes a few days to see the changes in SERP. But at this time some websites reported they experienced the changes within 48 hours.
The search algorithm can be identified as one of the fundamentals of computer science.
Google Search algorithms are designed in a way to bring the most relatable and useful information to search queries.
Depending on the search queries, Google will use many key factors to sort through the search index. There are main 5 key factors google focuses on. They are Meaning of Query, Relevance of content, Content Quality, Usability of the Webpage, and Context and settings.
Google typically releases few updates throughout the year to deliver the most relevant content to its searchers.
The latest algorithm update was more focused on removing spam results and EAT factors.
To be successful in SEO it is important to keep your eye on google search algorithm updates.