As you know, search engines are responsible for responding to users, and perhaps the nickname responsive engine is more suitable and expressive for it. 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’s results, you must first improve your website’s SEO, otherwise there will be no way for your website to appear in Google’s SERP.
Table of Contents
How does the search engine work?
The search engine goes through the following three processes:
Crawling
Crawlers search the web space to find new content. (search code and content for each new address)
Indexing
The content found during the crawling process is stored and organized to be displayed by key searches in Google Serp.
Ranking
In this part, the search engine ranks the content based on specific factors, of course, a significant number of which are unknown to us and their weighting is obtained empirically. It then displays them to the user under specific keyword searches.
What is search engine crawling?
Crawling is the process in which a search engine disperses a set of bots known as crawlers to find new content throughout the web. This content can be a web page, image, pdf, video, etc. But regardless of format, content is found by URL (link).
What does search engine index mean?
Search engines store and process the information they have found from the crawling stage in order to be ready to present to users.
What is search engine ranking?
After the index stage, the search engine ranks the content based on thematic relevance, title, address, domain validity, etc. and shows it to the user under keyword search.
Note: You may block your website from some crawlers or instruct the search engine not to index certain pages. If you want your content to be found by users, you must first make sure that it is accessible and indexed by Google’s crawlers. Otherwise, you will be invisible from Google results.
Crawl: Can a 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 to appear in Google results. One of the ways to check the 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 the Google search engine. This operator will list all the results it knows from this domain for you.
Although the number of results that Google will show you is not exact, this operator will give you a comprehensive view of which pages of the website are indexed.
To get a more detailed 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 site is brand new and doesn’t have a crawl budget yet.
- Your site does not have any external links.
- The structure of your site makes it difficult for Google bots to crawl.
- Your pages are noindex and the crawler is not allowed to collect information from it.
- Your site has been penalized by Google.
How to submit a crawl request to the search engine? (+ fix the problem)
- Using the search console or site operator: If you have used Google’s search console and you have noticed errors in the crawling and indexing of some of your pages, you must use a series of tricks to introduce your page to Google.
- Using the site map or fixing its errors that are displayed in the search console.
- Improving content qualitatively and quantitatively
- Change the page address and test it
- Disable your plugins one by one and submit your page to Search Console and monitor the results. Sometimes plugins will cause problems for Google bots.
- Many WordPress sites have flaws in their format that may disrupt the crawling process. To detect this issue, it is enough to disable your template once and introduce 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.
Optimization of crawl budget
Crawl budget is the average number of URLs that the Google bot examines before leaving your site. Crawl budget optimization ensures that crawlers don’t waste their time looking at your unimportant pages. Optimizing your crawl budget is especially important on very large sites with tens of thousands of pages, but it’s never a bad idea to block crawlers from accessing content you don’t care about. For this, it is enough to change the pages from index to noindex from within the sitemap.
Common mistakes that cause your website not to be crawled
- Mobile navigation that shows different results than desktop.
- Using JavaScript codes in navigation. (Google is sometimes weak in crawling JavaScript codes.)
- Personalize and display unique navigation to certain visitors
- Forgetting internal linking to high-profile and important pages
Indexing: How does the search engine interpret your website?
Once you have made sure that your site is seen by Google’s crawlers, the next step is to make sure that it can be indexed. Just because your site is discoverable and crawlable by a search engine, doesn’t necessarily mean it will be indexed by Google. In the previous section, we talked about crawling and how search engines discover web pages.
Indexing is the process by which your pages are stored in the Google database. After the crawler finds a page, the search engine renders it just like a browser would. In the process of doing this, the search engine analyzes the content of that page and stores all this information in its index.
Can I see how the Google crawler sees my site?
Of course; The cached version of your page will show you an image of the last time the Google bot crawled your page. Google crawls and caches web pages according to specific and different schedules. Well-known sites get more attention than unfamiliar websites. You can see what the cached version of a page looks like from the bot’s point of view by clicking the drop-down arrow next to the URL in Google’s SERP and selecting the “Cached” option.
Tip: 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 addresses?
How do search engines show us the best and most relevant results according to the user’s search? This is known as the ranking or sorting of 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 in order to improve the quality of search results. Some of these updates are very minor and aimed at improving 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 algorithm adjustments is to improve the overall search quality.
That’s why Google always gives the same answer to algorithm update questions:
We’re making quality updates all the time.
This means that if your site changes after a certain update from Google, you should adapt your website to the new settings and guidelines of Google so that you can remain on your former path or grow.
What does the search engine want?
Search engines have always wanted one thing: providing useful and accurate answers.
If this answer is true, then why does SEO seem to be different now than it was years ago?
For better understanding, I will explain the answer with an example:
If you are planning to learn a new second language, at first, understanding that language is very basic and difficult. Over time, your understanding will deepen and you will learn semantics: the implied meaning of words, sentences, terms, and the relationship between words and phrases. Eventually, with enough practice, you’ll improve enough in your second language to be able to pick up on nuances and answer ambiguous or incomplete questions.
When search engines first started learning our language, teaching them was a difficult task, and we had to use our keywords over and over to make our content understandable to Google’s crawlers. The result of this approach was that our content was full of keywords and the reader could not use it effectively to meet his needs!
But this was not the goal that search engines are looking for.
In that period when the search engine lacked the intelligence and sophistication of today, the term 10 blue links was coined to describe the flat structure of Google’s search engine. Whenever a search was performed, Google would display the results to the user in the form of pages with ten links.
The following are the most important features of Google Serp:
- Click Advertising
- Featured snippets
- Local results
- knowledge graph
- Site links
- Most relevant results
Google zero position
Position zero is the term used to describe the prominent block at the top of the Google search results page. For the first time in 2014, Google introduced a position called zero to quickly respond to users’ searches to answer user questions directly from the same page of results without the need to click. The information in the zero position includes the summary of the answer extracted from one of the pages on the web 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 answer to each user, it selects the content selected for position zero based on its close relevance to the user’s search and from among sites with better SEO. This featured snippet is called position zero and is displayed right after the ad at the top of the search results, and the website from which this response is taken is recognized as the top website in organic search.