Learn How Google Search Ranking Works

By Author: Joy Adella
Total Articles: 130
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But how does this work? How does it process and organize so much information to present the most useful or valuable websites to searchers?
About Google Search
Google Search uses web crawlers for exploring the web on a regular basis to find pages and add them to its index. The system works automatically based on Google’s vast algorithm that takes innumerable search ranking factors into account. When you have the basic knowledge of how Google search ranking works, it can help address crawling issues, optimize your website, and get your webpages indexed.
How Does Google Search Algorithm Work?
The exact Google search ranking factors have not been officially revealed. Still, search engine optimizers know from research and experience the most important ranking factors. The most important of these factors that have been discovered so far include:
• Page speed
• Mobile friendliness
• Accessible & secure website
• User experience
• Technical SEO
• Quality of web page content
• Social & local signals
• Quality backlinks
• URL authority
...
... Google will create an index after accessing and processing all web pages to deliver the best search results.
Stages of Google Search
In order to understand how Google search ranking works, it is important to know the process’ 3 different stages.
i. Crawling
Google starts by finding the webpages on the web. The search engine keeps looking for new and updated webpages and keeps adding them to its list. The process has a name – URL discovery. Besides Google’s own discovery of new pages, users can also submit a list of their pages.
When Google learns about a webpage’s URL, it may crawl the page to gather information on it. It uses software known as Googlebot to fetch the information. This program follows an algorithm-based process for the following steps:
• Which websites to crawl
• Number of pages to fetch from each website
• How often to crawl a website
ii. Indexing
Google crawlers have crawled a webpage, it will learn about the page. This stage involves the processing and analysis of the page content and the main content tags and attributes that include:
• Title elements
• Images
• Alt attributes
• Videos
Google uses the information to determine whether a webpage is a duplicate or any other page on the web or canonical. Canonical refers to the webpage that can be displayed in search results. Some of the common issues that affect indexing include:
• Content quality
• Website design that interferes with indexing
• Robots meta directives that disallow the indexing process
iii. Delivering Search Results
When someone searches a term on Google, its program searches the index for matching pages before returning the results that are considered to be the most relevant and useful for the user. The relevance of the results can be determined based on hundreds of factors such as user location, device, and language.
Sometimes a webpage may be indexed and be indicated in the Search Console but doesn’t appear in the search results. This can be caused by the following reasons:
• The content is not relevant to the searchers
• The content is of low quality
• Robots meta directives may not allow page serving
Google is always working on improving its algorithms. While most of the ranking factors stay the same, their importance can vary over time.
Ranking high on Google is something that should best be left to the experts. At Mystic Web Designn, we provide complete digital marketing solutions and services including SEO. For more information about our services, reach out to us at 1-212-763-6585 or 1-760-216-4589. You may also write to us.

Joy Adella is a freelance writer and writes about food & lifestyle blogs.