As you know, search engines are responsible for responding to users, and perhaps the title of responsive search engine is more appropriate and expressive. This smart tool has the task of discovering, understanding and organizing Internet content in order to provide the most relevant results to the user, and sometimes it will respond directly to the user without ranking. In order for your content to be visible in Google results, you must first improve your website SEO, otherwise there will be no way to display your website in Google SERP.
Table of Contents
How does a search engine work?
The search engine goes through the following three processes, respectively:
Crawling
Crawlers search the web for new content; Search code and content for each new URL.
Indexing
Content found is stored and organized during the crawl process to be displayed with key searches on Google’s head.
Ranking
In this part, the search engine ranks the content based on certain factors, of which a significant number of them are not visible to us and their weighting is obtained experimentally, and shows it to the user searching for specific keywords.
What is a search engine crawl?
Crawl is a process in which a search engine scatters a set of bots known as crawlers to find new content across the web. This content can be a web page, image, pdf, video and so on. But regardless of the format, the content is found by the URL (link).
What does search engine index mean?
Search engines store and process the information they find from the crawl stage as a list to be ready to provide to users.
What is a Search Engine Ranking?
After performing the indexing step, the search engine will rank the content based on thematic relevance, title, address, domain validity, etc. and show it to the user under search words.
Tip: You may block your website from being accessed by some crawlers or instruct the search engine not to save specific pages in their list. If you want your content to be found by users, you must first make sure it is accessible and indexable for Google crawlers. Otherwise you will be invisible to Google results.
Crawl: Can the search engine find your page?
As you have read so far, ensuring that your site is crawled and indexed is a prerequisite for your website appearing in Google results. One way to check indexed pages is to use the “site: yourdomain.com” operator, which will give you an advanced search. To do this, just type “site: yourdomain.com” in Google search engine. This operator will list all the results it knows from this domain.
Although the number of results that Google shows you is not accurate, this operator will give you a comprehensive view of which web pages are indexed.
To get a more accurate report, just use the search console and check the index coverage section.
Note: If you are not displayed in Google results, it may be for one of the following reasons:
- Your website is brand new and has no crawl budget yet.
- Your site has no external links.
- The structure of your site has made the crawl process difficult for Google bots.
- Your pages are noindex and crawlers are not allowed to collect information from it.
- Your site has been penalized by Google.
How to send a crawl request to a search engine? (+ Troubleshooting)
- Using a search console or site operator: You have used and noticed a crawl defect and indexed some of your pages, you should use a series of tricks to introduce your page to Google.
- Use the sitemap or fix the errors that are displayed to you in the search console.
- Improving content qualitatively and quantitatively
- Change the page URL and test it
- Disable your plugins one by one and submit your page to the console search and monitor the result. Sometimes plugins can cause problems for Google bots.
- Many WordPress sites have their own drawbacks that may disrupt the crawl process. To diagnose this, just deactivate your template once and submit your content to the search console for indexing.
Create an internal link from your powerful pages to a page that is not indexed and check the result.
Crawl budget optimization
Crawl budget is the average number of URLs that a Google bot examines before leaving your site. Crawl budget optimization ensures that the crawler does not waste time viewing your trivial pages. Crawling budget optimization is very important on very large sites with tens of thousands of pages, but it is never a bad idea to prevent crawlers from accessing content that is not important to you. All you have to do is change the pages from index to noindex from within the sitemap.
- Common Mistakes That Keep Your Website from crawling
- Mobile navigation that shows different results than desktop.
- Use JavaScript code in navigation. (Google is sometimes weak in crawling JavaScript code.)
- Personalize and display unique scrolling to some visitors
- Forget internal linking to upstream and important pages
Indexing: How does a search engine interpret your website?
Once you are sure that your site has been viewed by Google crawlers, your next step is to make sure that it can be indexed as well. Just because your site is searchable by a search engine does not necessarily mean that it is cached by Google. In the previous section, we talked about crawling and how web pages are discovered by search engines.
Indexing is the process by which your pages are stored in the Google Database. Once the crawler finds a page, the search engine renders it just like a browser. In the process, the search engine analyzes the content of that page and stores all this information in its list.
Can I see how Google Crawler sees my site?
Of course; The cached version of your page will show you an image of the last time a Google bot crawled your page. Google crawls and stores web pages according to different time schedules. Well-known sites get more attention than unfamiliar websites. You can see what the cached version of a page looks like by clicking the drop-down arrow next to the URL in Google SERP and selecting the “Cached” option.
Note: You can also view the text version of your website independently and see if your text content is fully crawled.
Ranking: How do search engines rank URLs?
How do search engines show us the best and most relevant results according to the user’s search? This is known as ranking search results based on the most relevant to the least relevant content by Google.
To determine relevance, search engines use algorithms to categorize and sort stored information. These algorithms have changed a lot in recent years to improve the quality of search results. Some of these updates are very minor and in order to improve the quality of search engine performance, and some of these updates are focused on improving the performance of the algorithm and are designed to deal with a specific problem.
Why are algorithms updated?
Although Google never discloses the details of its algorithms and periodic updates, we know that Google’s goal in making the algorithm settings is to improve the overall quality of the search.
That’s why when answering algorithm update questions, Google always gives one answer:
We’re making quality updates all the time
This means that if your site changes after a specific update from Google, you will need to adapt your website to Google’s new settings and guidelines so that you can stay on track or grow.
What does a search engine want?
Search engines always wanted one thing: to provide useful and accurate answers.
If this answer is correct, then why does SEO seem to be different from previous years?
For a better understanding, I will give the answer with an example:
If you are planning to learn a new second language, at first it is very basic and of course difficult to understand. Over time, your understanding will deepen and you will learn semantics; Implicit meaning of words, sentences, terms and the relationship between words and phrases. Eventually, with enough practice, you will progress enough in the second language to be able to understand subtle differences and answer vague or incomplete questions.
When search engines just started learning our language, learning them was hard work, and we had to use our keywords over and over again to make our content understandable to Google crawlers. The result of this approach was that our content was full of keywords and the reader could not use it effectively to meet their needs!
But that was not the goal of the search engines.
At a time when search engines lacked today’s intelligence and complexity, the term 10 blue links was coined to describe the flat structure of Google’s head. Each time a search was performed, Google displayed the results to the user in the form of ten-page pages.
The most important features of Google Header are the following:
- Per Click Advertising
- Featured snippets
- Local results
- Knowledge graph
- Site links
- The most relevant results
Google Zero Position
Zero position is a term used to describe the highlighted block at the top of the Google search results page. For the first time in 2014, Google introduced a position called zero for quick response to user searches to answer user questions directly from the same results page without the need to click. The information in position zero includes a summary of the response extracted from one of the web pages along with the page link. From Google’s point of view, it is the best and most accurate answer to the user’s search.
Because Google seeks to provide the best response to each user, it selects the content selected for position zero based on its proximity to the user’s search and among the sites with better SEO. This highlight is called the zero position and is displayed right after the ads at the top of the search results, and the website from which this response was taken is recognized as the top website in natural search.