How Google Works
By: Jenna Ryan
The Marketing Shop.com
Google is essentially an organizer of websites. Much like the Dewey Decimal System is used to file library books by topic, Google indexes web pages by factors such as topic, popularity and keyword relevancy.
Googlebots: High Tech Librarians
Google sends its search engine crawlers, called Googlebots, to record and categorize every website within reach. Sites it cannot crawl are skipped over, while those it can read are indexed and ranked. When someone does a search on Google, the sites that pop-up are sites that were previously recorded to best match the keywords of the search. Google's main objective is to index websites so that the best sites possible show up first, that most accurately match the searcher's request.
1. Google sends out crawlers that travel from web page to web page via links on the pages.
2. Google indexes the website pages in its repository.
3. Google ranks (categorizes) pages according to on-page factors such as titles, meta tags and textual keywords.
4. Google calculates the ratio of inbound anchor text.
5. Google adjusts the results by page rank scores. (Ridings)
Sites That Google Can't Crawl
Some websites are not indexable because the crawlers can't crawl the site. This serious problem can be blamed on a number of techncial issues such as:
- Dirty Code that crawlers can't read.
- No textual content for crawlers to record.
- Frames that crawlers can't see.
- Photos only pages that are invisible to crawlers.
- Poorly built sites without a robots.txt file.
- Websites with no textual navigation links.
The first step to making your website readable by Googlebot is to make sure it's built to be search engine friendly, addressing all the issues above.
How Webpages are Ranked & Categorized
Once a web page is read by the crawlers, the text of the page is recorded on Google's server and arranged according to its topic. Note, the only thing that Google records on its server is the text. It makes no use of photos, graphics, Flash or animation. Only the text is recorded and arranged by keyword topic. Sites are also ranked by other factors such as:
- Age of your domain name
- Webpage & Website Topic
- Meta tags
- Incoming links
- Internal site links
- Outgoing links
- Website popularity
- Content freshness
- Topic consistency
- Time frame of improvements
- Domain address
- IP Address
- Keyword spamming
- CTR - click-through-rates
- Duplication of content
- Page structure
- Image alt tags
- Paragraph headings
Spam Websites
Google's job is no easy one. It must continually update and increase it's ranking criteria to hedge spam. Spam are websites that are built to rise to the top of search engines from a technical perspective, but that aren't necessarily the best fit for the search topic. You've probably seen websites out there that are filled with meaningless keywords at the top of results. Google is on a mission to get rid of sites that get to the top. Google is more interested in websites that are reliable, have been around a long time, are naturally popular, and contain original and unique information about the topic it covers. This is why it is the most important goal of search engine optimization to create a website that has valuable content without using questionable tactics such as link exchanges and keyword stuffing, all meant to "trick" search engine crawlers into ranking a site just for technical reasons.
Attracting Google's Crawlers to Your Website
If you want to rank well in the search engines naturally, put out a welcome mat for search engine crawlers. Here's a few ways to do just that:
1. Make sure the code on your website is clean. Is it clean HTML? The crawlers have only a few seconds to read each page. Clean code without style-mark-up and embedded Javascript will improve the crawlers' ability to get in and out of your site's code. Having code that's unnecessary in the page is like inviting friends over for dinner and blocking the pathway from the front door to the dining room. It doesn't make sense. A webmaster who specializes in search engine optimization can tell you in a minute whether your website's code contains frivolous items or not.
2. Continually write unique and original content for your website. Crawlers are most attracted to content that is not duplicated elsewhere on the web and will return more often to pages that are updated with informaiton related to its central theme. This is a catch 22 for many at this time, however, as the content must be placed on a part of your website that is crawlable, but many of the template systems that allow people to add their own content are not search engine friendly. If you write your own content, find a really good search engine expert to upload your content to your website using good search engine principals or else your time may be wasted.
3. Place the links of your navigation strategically on the site. Where you place your website's navigation can impact it's search engine crawlability. For example, having links to every page stem from the home page is a great asset when trying to get your entire site indexed by Google because Google really pays attention to the home page of your website more than any other page. Using keywords in your navigation will help tell the crawlers what the page it is traveling to is about, thus assisting in the indexing process. And, using textual links in your navigation is the very best way to communicate topics with the crawlers.
4. Build your website to be as flat as possible. A flat website is more comfortable to crawlers than a site that is several directories deep. This does not apply to every type of search engine optimized website, but to sites that are generally created for real estate agents, there is just no sense in creating several directories on your website. The URL of your site should look like this: http://www.the-marketing-shop.com/ , not http://www.the-marketing-shop.com/-- unless you are an SEO expert and you really know what your doing.
References
Page Rank Explained - Chris Ridings
