Create a better website: how Google works (part 2)

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Create a better website: how Google works (part 2)

Following on from last week’s article Google’s advice on how to create a better website, this week we are going to focus on How Google works. Once your site and content is sorted, you now need to make sure your potential customers can find you. To do this it is important for you to understand how Google works, crawls your pages, indexes your site and serves it up within the search engine results.

Algorithms and rankings factors

When you do a Google search, you aren’t actually searching the internet. Instead you are just searching Google’s index of the web, which is like a library of all the webpages Google could find on the internet.

Google finds all these pages using software programmes called spiders. These spiders start by crawling a few pages, and then they follow the links within those webpages to other websites, then they follow the links on those websites and the process goes on until they have indexed almost the entire internet.

Searching the web

When a user wants to search on Google for some information, say they wanted to find an estate agent based in Enfield, they are likely to search “Estate Agents Enfield”. Google’s software will then search through their index to find every page that includes those search terms which is likely to be hundreds of thousands of possible websites.

So how does Google narrow down the results to find the best websites for my search?

They ask questions; in fact they ask hundreds of questions, for example:

  • How relevant is the keyword to this webpage?
  • Do the keywords appear in the title?
  • Is this webpage from a high quality or low quality website?
  • How many high quality backlinks does this site have?
  • How long has this website been established for?

Once they have asked all these questions they then combine all those ranking factors to produce an overall score for the individual webpages. The results are then listed in order (this is all done within about half a second).

Now you know how Google works, next week we will look at how to help Google quickly and easily understand the content on your website and the guidelines you need to be following.  

Luke Stanley