Google uses an algorithm called Page Rank to determine where websites appear in its search results. We’ll give you an overview of search engine functionality in this guide. This will cover the crawling and indexing procedures as well as ideas like crawl budget and PageRank.
Search engines work by crawling hundreds of billions of pages using their own web crawlers. These web crawlers are commonly referred to as search engine bots or spiders. A search engine navigates the web by downloading web pages and following links on these pages to discover new pages that have been made available.
-Deepcrawl
How Search Engines Index?
Search engines efficiently organize and index webpages, ensuring that valuable content can be easily found and accessed by users around the globe. This indexing process involves adding discovered webpages to a robust data structure, empowering individuals to explore a vast array of online information effortlessly.
The section includes every URL that has been found together with a variety of pertinent key signals regarding what each URL contains, like:
- What topics are addressed by the page based on the keywords found within its text?
- The type of content that is being crawled (using microdata called Schema) – what is included on the page?
- The freshness of the page – how recently was it updated?
- The historical user interaction with the page and/or domain – how do users engage with the page?
What Purpose Does a Search Engine Algorithm Serve?
The aim of the search engine algorithm is to present a relevant set of high quality search results that will fulfil the user’s query/question as quickly as possible. The user then selects an option from the list of search results and this action, along with subsequent activity, then feeds into future learnings which can affect search engine rankings going forward.
-static.googleusercontent
What transpires when a search is conducted?
Mostly ,when a search query is entered into a search engine by a user, all of the pages which are deemed to be relevant are identified from the index and an algorithm is used to hierarchically rank the relevant pages into a set of results.
The algorithms used to rank the most relevant results differ for each search engine. For example, a page that ranks highly for a search query on Google may not rank highly for the same query on Bing.
In addition to the search query, search engines use other relevant data to return results, including:
- Location – Some search queries are location-dependent e.g. ‘SEO companies near me’ or ‘Buy cakes online’.
- Language detected – Search engines will return results in the language of the user, if it can be detected.
- History of earlier searches – Search engines will return different results for a query dependent on what user has previously searched for.
- Device – A different set of results may be returned based on the device from which the query was made.
How Come a Page Might Not Be Indexed?
A URL might not be indexed by a search engine for a variety of reasons. It could be because:
- The URL returning an error page (e.g. a 404 Not Found HTTP response code).
- Robots.txt file exclusions – a file which tells search engines what they shouldn’t visit on your site.
- Directives on the webpage telling search engines not to index that page (nonindexed tag) or to index another similar page (canonical tag).
- Search engine algorithms judging the page to be of low quality, have thin content or contain duplicate content.
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