Most people know what a search engine is. It is how we can access a fountain of knowledge within seconds and connect with people from every corner of the world. However, many wouldn’t be able to explain how search engines work despite using them to explore the internet.
We are going to kickstart the answer to the question of how do search engines work with a few basics before moving onto the more complex processes that enable the search engines to work as they do.
What is a SERP?
Before diving into how a search engine works, knowing what a SERP is, is helpful. Put simply, SERP means Search Engine Results Page. The basics of a SERP are how results appear after you type a query into Google. The higher your SERP Google ranking, the more clicks your content or website will receive, with the first page receiving the most clicks. According to Sistrix, the first result in a Google search has a 28.5% click-through rate.
If you can rank within the first 5 results, this will have a big impact on how many people click through to visit your website. To have the best chance at boosting your SEO and know how Google SERP works, we’ve created this handy guide that answers the important question: how does a search engine work?
Search Engines: How do they work on a basic level
Search engines, on a very basic level, work by performing three simple functions:
- Crawling the internet (to find new web pages, content, and documents)
- Putting the content into an index (a huge database)
- Ranking this content and websites (based on several important factors)
How do web search engines work
Now we know the basics (crawl, index, rank,etc), we can start to look deeper into these three factors, answering questions such as, what is crawling and indexing the web, and how do these search engines rank websites? So just how does a search engine truly work?
Broken down, indexing, crawling, and ranking are the three important functions that underpin how Google search works. The good news is that crawling, indexing, and ranking are easy enough to understand.
1. Understanding how crawling works
Crawling in search engine is the process of search engines discovering new content. A search engine that crawls uses its own ‘search engine spiders,’ also known as crawlers, to find any new content published online. New content can be anything from images and videos to web pages and PDF files.
Of course, these aren’t real spiders. Instead, search engine crawlers are computer programs that create robots to hunt down new content. Their purpose is simple: to find the best content to show users. Engine crawlers vary between search engines, but Google’s crawler is called Googlebot.
What is search engine crawling?
Crawling in search engine is the process of search engines discovering new content. A search engine that crawls uses its own ‘search engine spiders,’ also known as crawlers, to find any new content published online. New content can be anything from images and videos to web pages and PDF files.
Of course, these aren’t real spiders. Instead, search engine crawlers are computer programs that create robots to hunt down new content. Their purpose is simple: to find the best content to show users. Engine crawlers vary between search engines, but Google’s crawler is called Googlebot.
How do search engines crawl websites?
How a search engine discovers a new page has changed. You used to simply submit your site to the search engines. However, this isn’t necessary anymore. Instead, they have become more advanced at discovering new content using these crawlers.
So how does a search engine work? To understand this, you must know the crawling in SEO meaning. Crawlers will crawl the web pages that are known to them very quickly and determine if anything has changed since the last search crawl, such as if there is a new web page with a fresh blog uploaded, for example.
The content that they find by visiting links on web pages can be:
- Other web pages
- PDF files
- Videos
- Images
Once it has been through this process, the index will be updated to reflect the changes made — more on how does search engine indexing work later.
Explain crawling in SEO: Increasing your chances of getting crawled
As a general unwritten rule, crawlers often visit the more popular websites more frequently. Why? Popular websites generally update and add new content regularly to provide for their readership and audience compared to small websites that aren’t as well known yet. This is why many people aim to get a link from one of these popular sites.
Gaining a link on their website could result in your content getting discovered, which is why link building campaigns can be so important to anyone looking to increase their visibility.
As well as link building being a valuable tool, it is also important to ensure that you are doing everything you can to boost your crawl rankings and ensure your website is being crawled properly and complements how Google crawling works.
Here are 5 tips on how to do this:
Add internal linking: To ensure that your new content is found, you are always better off linking it to an existing page on your website. This way, when it comes to crawling your site once again, they can easily find your new web page.
Create a sitemap: Having a good sitemap will help search engines crawl your website more easily and help them discover your currently unknown pages. This is because a good sitemap will link to every single one of your web pages on your site.
Use robots.txt for optimisation: As for the technical aspect of SEO, you should use the robots.txt code carefully. One wrong move, and Google will ignore the corresponding pages. Robots.txt tells Google not to crawl a webpage. When used wisely, it can help crawlers to prioritise the most important pages. You might not want search engines to index pages with little content; thank you pages, staging pages, duplicate content, or internal search results, for example.
Get backlinks: Earning backlinks from other authority websites tell crawling search engines that your content is important to other websites, boosting your authority.
Share content on social media: In the same way that backlinks tell search engines that you produce content that can be trusted, sharing to social media also helps with Google rankings.
Sign up to Google Console: Sign up for an account and see if any crawling errors have occurred during the crawling process that might mean your new web page hasn’t been indexed. These errors could be down to poor navigation structure, server errors, or redirect loops. You will also be able to see more data on pages that specifically Google has crawled.
Google’s crawl budget
When it comes to Google crawling and indexing, we have to mention the crawl budget. Crawl budget refers to the effort that the search engine will use when crawling a website.
It is based on these 2 factors:
- The importance of your site
- The speed of your site
If you have a news website that is frequently updated with content that search engine users will want to know, your site will be crawled constantly. In contrast, if you run a small independent business with only a few links that are not deemed important, then Google’s crawl budget will be low.
Now you know what is meant by crawling in SEO, it’s time to turn our attention to indexing.
2. How to index websites on search engines
Search engine crawling and indexing go hand in hand. Once a site has been crawled and new web pages or content has been discovered, this information will be stored in an index. However, what is an index, what is Google index, and what does it mean for your web pages and content?
The difference between crawling and indexing
To understand what is crawling, indexing, and ranking in SEO, you should know crawling and indexing apart. Crawling is the discovery process for search engines when they look for new content. When indexing, search engines store and arrange the content they find during crawling. Once in Google’s index of websites, it has the chance to be displayed in relevant search results.
What is index in SEO?
An index is an enormous database that contains all the web pages that the search engines have found on the internet. If you aren’t in this index, you may as well be lost. You won’t be able to get organic traffic from search engines such as Google simply because it is not part of their system.
Search engine indexes list all the web pages that they know about. Once Google has indexed your web pages, it places them in the Google index of web pages, and it can decide how to show them in search results.
How to get Google to index your site
Knowing how Google indexing works is all part of the game to get your content to appear on results pages. Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to months, so remember to be patient when wanting your site to be indexed by search engines.
Your website needs to be indexable for your web pages to appear in search engine results. The most straightforward way to get your site indexed is through Google Search Console. Go to the URL Inspection Tool and paste the URL you want to be indexed and wait for Google to check it. If it turns out that your page isn’t indexed, you can click the ‘Request Indexing’ button to start the process.
While you are doing this, make sure that you don’t have any HTML tags or code preventing Google from crawling and indexing your website.
How do search engines index websites?
Indexing website for search engines means that when a user inputs a search query, the search engine will analyse the database and fetch the appropriate content. In simple terms, indexing refers to the adding of a webpage’s content to Google for it to be considered for rankings.
Within the index, however, there will be millions of websites and thousands of options that could answer the query.
So how do search engines pull up and display the right results? The short answer: They rank them!
3. How do search engines rank websites
The final part of the search engine process is ranking. Search engines use algorithms to determine how to rank websites for different search terms and queries. These algorithms will score a website based on whether it fits its requirements. For Google, this could mean looking at whether the content has used too many keywords or if it is in line with their E.A.T guidelines.
How do Google rankings work?
“How does search engine ranking work?” is a fair question. When Google ranks your site, it considers relevancy and authority. Search engine indexing algorithms change all the time, however, simply to improve the service and search results for users. After all, a search engine’s job is to provide the quality content the user is seeking so that they continue using their search engine.
To ensure that the most relevant websites appear on Google pages, core updates for Google indexing 2022 changed. Google’s core updates aim to improve the relevancy of search results to make them more useful to those using the search engine giant.
Frequent changes like these are why it can be better to outsource to experts in SEO who regularly keep up to date with any changes and will know how to achieve a higher ranking spot. The search engines take various factors into consideration when ranking content, so if you are unsure what you need to do, fortunately, we have put together a guide on the different ranking factors applicable to Google.
How to improve your rankings?
One way to improve your Google index ranking is by performing a SERP audit. This involves extensive keyword research, identifying search intent, conducting competitor analysis, finding ranking opportunities, and optimising your content to get it ranking on Google pages.
By searching for a SERP checker UK, you can analyse SERPs on a technical level as well. The SERP intelligence gained from using a checker tool will provide you with data about page and domain authority, content type, link metrics, user intent, and SERP volatility.
How we can help
The search engine landscape is constantly changing, and it can be hard to keep up with unless you are an SEO expert. Crawling, indexing, ranking – these are three key components of how a search engine works.
At Click Intelligence, we know search inside out and can help take your rankings to the next level. From link building, extensive keyword research, and website audits to optimising your website, our team understands SEO strategies and how Google indexes websites. Importantly, we know how it ranks them. Contact us today to see how we can help how search engines crawl, index, and rank your webpages!
