How do search results work on google

When it comes to SEO, one thing you can do is make it easier for Google to understand the content of your page. Once your website has been indexed, Google not only knows the website exists, but it has looked through the product pages on your site and understands that you sell 10 different kinds of cupcakes, including gluten-free cupcakes.

When a user types something into a search box, Google looks through its massive library of content to figure out which web pages would be most relevant to the user.

This process is called ranking. These are entirely different and separated from other slots on the search results page that can be paid for by businesses. Advertising with Google does not have any effect on your site's presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in its organic search results.

What sets Google apart is how it ranks its results, which determines the order Google displays results on its search engine results pages.

Google uses a trademarked algorithm called PageRank, which assigns each Web page a relevancy score. Out of these three factors, the third is the most important. Because Google looks at links to a Web page as a vote, it's not easy to cheat the system.

The best way to make sure your Web page is high on Google's search results is to provide great content so that other sites will link to your page. The more links your page gets, the higher its PageRank score will be. If you attract the attention of sites with a high PageRank score, your score will grow faster. A search engine spider does the search engine's grunt work: It scans Web pages and creates indexes of keywords. Once a spider has visited, scanned, categorized and indexed a page, it follows links from that page to other sites.

The spider will continue to crawl from one site to the next, which means the search engine's index becomes more comprehensive and robust.

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Google is the search engine that most SEO professionals and website owners care about because it has the potential to send more traffic their way than any other search engine. Most well-known search engines like Google and Bing have trillions of pages in their search indexes. Everything begins with a known list of URLs. Google discovers these through various processes, but the three most common ones are:. Google already has an index containing trillions of web pages.

If someone adds a link to one of your pages from one of those web pages, they can find it from there. Our crawler is the second most active after Google ,so you should see a reasonably complete view of your backlinks here.

Sitemaps list all of the important pages on your website. If you submit your sitemap to Google, it may help them discover your website faster. Crawling is where a computer bot called a spider e. This is important because it means that search engines might crawl and index some of your pages before others.

If you have a large website, it could take a while for search engines to fully crawl it. Processing is where Google works to understand and extract key information from crawled pages. Nobody outside of Google knows every detail about this process, but the important parts for our understanding are extracting links and storing content for indexing.

Indexing is where processed information from crawled pages is added to a big database called the search index. Discovering, crawling, and indexing content is merely the first part of the puzzle. Search engines also need a way to rank matching results when a user performs a search. This is the job of search engine algorithms. Each search engine has unique algorithms for ranking web pages. When asked about the two most important ranking factors , his response was simple: content and links.

I can tell you what they [the top two ranking factors] are. It is content. Links have been an important ranking factor in Google since when they introduced PageRank, a formula for judging the value of a web page based on the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to it. When we analyzed over one billion pages, we found a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and the amount of organic traffic it gets from Google.

How do you define authority? Google talks about relevance in the context of ranking useful pages on their page about how search works. Google also uses interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries.