How Google Search engine Works (beginners and advanced seo )

How Google Search Works (for beginners and advanced seo)

How Google Search Works (for beginners)

Google gets information from many different sources, including:

• Web pages
• User-submitted content such as Google My Business and Maps user submissions
• Book scanning
• Public databases on the internet
• Many other sources

However, this page focuses on web pages. Google follows three basic steps to generate results from web pages:

• Crawling
• Indexing
• Serving (and ranking)   

Crawling

The first step is finding out what pages exist on the web. There isn't a central registry of all web pages, so Google must constantly search for new pages and add them to its list of known pages. Some pages are known because Google has already visited them before. Other pages are discovered when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page. Still other pages are discovered when a website owner submits a list of pages (a sitemap) for Google to crawl. If you're using a managed web host, such as Wix or Blogger, they might tell Google to crawl any updated or new pages that you make.

Once Google discovers a page URL, it visits, or crawls, the page to find out what's on it. Google renders the page and analyzes both the text and non-text content and overall visual layout to decide where it should appear in Search results. The better that Google can understand your site, the better we can match it to people who are looking for your content.

To improve your site crawling:

• Verify that Google can reach the pages on your site, and that they look correct. Google accesses the web as an anonymous user (a user with no passwords or information). Google should also be able to see all the images and other elements of the page to be able to understand it correctly. You can do a quick check by typing your page URL in the Mobile-Friendly Test.
• If you've created or updated a single page, you can submit an individual URL to Google. To tell Google about many new or updated pages at once, use a sitemap.
• If you ask Google to crawl only one page, make it your home page. Your home page is the most important page on your site, as far as Google is concerned. To encourage a complete site crawl, be sure that your home page (and all pages) contain a good site navigation system that links to all the important sections and pages on your site; this helps users (and Google) find their way around your site. For smaller sites (less than 1,000 pages), making Google aware of only your homepage is all you need, provided that Google can reach all your other pages by following a path of links that start from your homepage.
• Get your page linked to by another page that Google already knows about. However, be warned that links in advertisements, links that you pay for in other sites, links in comments, or other links that don't follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines won't be followed by Google.

Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, or rank it higher. If anyone tells you otherwise, they're wrong.

Indexing

After a page is discovered, Google tries to understand what the page is about. This process is called indexing. Google analyzes the content of the page, catalogs images and video files embedded on the page, and otherwise tries to understand the page. This information is stored in the Google index, a huge database stored in many, many (many!) computers.

To improve your page indexing:

• Create short, meaningful page titles.
• Use page headings that convey the subject of the page.
• Use text rather than images to convey content. Google can understand some image and video, but not as well as it can understand text. At minimum, annotate your video and images with alt text and other attributes as appropriate.

Serving (and ranking)

When a user types a query, Google tries to find the most relevant answer from its index based on many factors. Google tries to determine the highest quality answers, and factor in other considerations that will provide the best user experience and most appropriate answer, by considering things such as the user's location, language, and device (desktop or phone). For example, searching for "bicycle repair shops" would show different answers to a user in Paris than it would to a user in Hong Kong. Google doesn't accept payment to rank pages higher, and ranking is done programmatically.

To improve your serving and ranking:

• Make your page fast to load, and mobile-friendly.
• Put useful content on your page and keep it up to date.
• Follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines, which help ensure a good user experience.
• Read more tips and best practices in our SEO starter guide.
• You can find more information here, including the guidelines that we provide to our quality raters to ensure that we're providing good results.

An even longer version 

Want more in-depth information about how Search works? Read our Advanced guide to how Google Search works.

Getting started: Advanced users

If you've already mastered the beginner tasks of maintaining a website on Google and using Search Console, this page goes into more advanced topics in managing and maintaining a website.

Even though you're an advanced user, be sure that you've reviewed the SEO Starter Guide; it's a great resource for best practices for your site.

Control how Google crawls and indexes your site

Read the Advanced guide to how Google Search works; if you don't understand the crawl/index/serving pipeline well, it will be difficult to debug issues or anticipate Search behavior on your site.

Duplicate content 

Be sure that you understand what canonical pages are, and how they affect crawling and indexing of your site. Also understand how to remove or handle duplicate content on your site, when it is merited.

Resources 

Be sure that any resources (images, CSS files, and so on) or pages that Google is meant to crawl are accessible to Google; that is, they are not blocked by any robots.txt rules and are accessible to an anonymous user. Inaccessible pages will not appear in the Index Coverage report, and the URL Inspection tool will show them as not crawled. Blocked resources are shown only at the individual URL level, in the URL Inspection tool. If important resources on a page are blocked, this can prevent Google from crawling your page properly. Use the URL Inspection tool to render the live page to verify whether Google sees the page as you expect.

Robots.txt 

Use robots.txt rules to prevent crawling, and sitemaps to encourage crawling. Block crawling of duplicate content on your site, or unimportant resources (such as small, frequently used graphics such as icons or logos) that might overload your server with requests. Don't use robots.txt as a mechanism to prevent indexing; use the noindex tag or login requirements for that. Read more about blocking access to your content.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are a very important way to tell Google which pages are important to your site, and also provide additional information (such as update frequency), and are very important for crawling non-textual content (such as images or video). Although Google won't limit crawling to pages listed in your sitemaps, it will prioritize crawling these pages. This is especially important for sites with rapidly changing content, or with pages that might not be discovered through links. Using sitemaps helps Google discover and prioritize which pages to crawl on your site. Read all about sitemaps here.

Internationalized or multi-lingual sites

If your site includes multiple languages, or is targeted at users in specific locales:

• Read about multi-regional and multi-lingual sites for high-level advice on how to manage sites that have localized content for different languages or regions.
• Use hreflang to tell Google about different language variations of pages on your site.
• If your site adapts the content of its pages based on the locale of the request, read how this can affect Google's crawl of your site.
• If your site has a generic top-level domain (.com, .org) rather than a locale-specific top-level domain (.ch, .in), you can tell Google which locations to target with your search results.

Migrating a page or a site

On the occasion that you might need to move a single URL or even a whole site, follow these guidelines:

Migrating a single URL

If you move a page permanently to another location, don't forget to implement 301 redirects for your page. If the move is only temporary for some reason, return 302 instead to indicate to Google that they should continue to crawl your page.

When a user requests a page that has been removed, you can create a custom 404 page to provide a better experience. Just be sure that when a user requests a page that is no longer there, you return a true 404 error, not a soft 404.

Migrating a site

If you're migrating an entire site, implement all the 301 and sitemap changes you need, then tell Google about the move so that we can start crawling the new site and forwarding your signals to the new site. Learn how to migrate your site.

Follow crawling and indexing best practices

• Make your links crawlable. Google can follow links only if they are an <a> tag with an href attribute. Links that use other formats won't be followed by Google's crawlers. Google cannot follow <a> links without an href tag or other tags that perform as links because of scripted click events.
• Use rel=nofollow for paid links, links that require login, or untrusted content (such as user-submitted content) to avoid passing your quality signals on to them, or having their bad quality reflect on you.
• Managing your crawl budget: If your site is particularly large (hundreds of millions of pages that change periodically, or perhaps tens of millions of pages that change frequently), Google might not be able to crawl your entire site as often as you'd like, so you might need to point Google to the most important pages on your site. The best mechanism for doing so at present is to list your most recently updated or most important pages in your sitemaps, and (possibly temporarily) hiding your less important pages using robots.txt rules.
• JavaScript usage: Follow Google's recommendations for JavaScript on websites.
• Multi-page articles: If you have an article broken into several pages, be sure that there are prominent next and previous links for users to click (and that these are crawlable links). That's all you need for the page set to be crawled by Google.
• Infinite scroll pages: Google can have trouble scrolling through infinite scroll pages; you should provide a paginated version if you want the page to be crawled. Learn more about search-friendly infinite scroll pages.
• Block access to URLs that change state, such as posting comments, creating accounts, adding items to a cart, and so on. Use robots.txt to block these URLs.
• Review the list of which file types are indexable by Google.
• In the unlikely situation that Google seems to be crawling your site too much, you can turn down the crawl rate for your site. However, this should be a rare occurrence.
• If your site is still HTTP, we recommend migrating to HTTPS, for your users' security, as well as your own.

Help Google understand your site

Put key information in text, not graphics, on the site. Although Google can parse and index many file types, text is still the safest bet to help us understand the content of the page. If you use non-text content, or if you want to provide additional guidance about the content of the site, add structured data to your pages to help us understand your content (and in some cases, provide special search features such as rich results).

If you feel comfortable with HTML and basic coding, you can add structured data by hand following the developer guidelines. If you want a little help, you can use the WYSIWYG Structured Data Markup helper to help you generate basic structured data for you.

If you don't have the ability to add structured data to your pages, you might use the Data Highlighter tool, which lets you highlight portions of a page and tell Google what each section represents (an event, a date, a price, and so on). This is simple, but it can break if you change the layout of your page.

Read more about helping Google understand your site content.

Follow our guidelines

Important: Be sure to follow our Webmaster Guidelines. Some of these are recommendations and best practices; others can lead to a site being removed from the Google Index if you do not follow them.

Content-specific guidelines

If you have specific types of content on your site, here are some recommendations for getting them on Google in the best way:

• Video: Be sure to follow our video best practices to enable Google to find, crawl, and show results for videos hosted on your site.
• Podcasting: You can expose podcasts to Google by following these guidelines.
• Images: Follow our image best practices to get your images to appear in Search. You can show additional information about your image in Google Images by providing image rights metadata on the image host page. To block an image from being indexed, use a robots.txt Disallow rule.
• For children: If your content is specifically for children, tag your pages or site as child-directed in order to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
• Adult sites: If your site (or specific pages) contain adult-only content, you might consider tagging it as adult content, which will filter it in SafeSearch results.
• Bloggers: If your site is a blog, here are some tips for creating a useful blog and helping Google crawl it.
• News: If you run a news site, here are some important considerations:
  • If you have news content, be sure to read the Google Publisher Center help documentation.
  • In addition, create a News sitemap to help Google discover content more quickly.
  • Be sure to prevent comment spam in your site.
  • If you want to provide a limited number of free views to visitors, read about flexible sampling to learn some best practices about providing limited free access to your content.
  • See how to indicate subscription and paywalled content on your site to Google while still enabling crawling.
  • See how to use meta tags to limit text or image use when generating search result snippets.
  • Consider using AMP or Web Stories for fast-loading content.
• Other sites (for example, sites about businesses, books, apps, scholarly works): See other Google services where you can post your information.
• See if Google supports a Search feature specific for your content type. Google supports specialized Search features for recipes, events, job posting sites, and more.

Manage the user experience

Providing a good user experience should be your site's top goal, and a good user experience is a ranking factor. There are many elements to providing a good user experience; here are a few of them.

Google recommends that websites use HTTPS, rather than HTTP, to improve user and site security. Sites that use HTTP can be marked as "not secure" in the Chrome browser. Read guidelines on securing your site with HTTPS.

Ensure that your site works in different browsers and different platforms.

A fast page usually beats a slow page in user satisfaction. You can use the Core Web Vitals report to see your site-wide performance numbers, or PageSpeed Insights to test performance for individual pages. You can learn more about building fast pages on the web.dev site. Also consider using AMP for fast pages.

Mobile considerations

With mobile searches now exceeding desktop searches, it's important that your site be mobile-friendly. Googlebot now uses a mobile crawler as the default crawler for websites. Read about how to make your site mobile friendly.

You should also read these additional pages about mobile usage on Google, including behavior on feature phones, how Google Discover works on mobile devices, and also guidelines about announcing any mobile billing charges clearly on your site to prevent warnings in Google Chrome.

Paywalls and controlling access

If you want to provide a limited number of free views to visitors, read about flexible sampling to learn some best practices about providing limited free access to your content or enabling Google to crawl paywalled content.

Control your search appearance

Google provides many kinds of search result features and experiences in Google Search, including review stars, embedded site search boxes, and special result types for specific types of information such as events or recipes. See which ones are appropriate for your site and consider implementing them. You can provide a favicon to show in search results for your site. You can also provide an article date to appear in search results.

Be sure to read the article on how to help Google provide good titles and snippets. You can also restrict the snippet length, or omit it entirely if you wish. See how to use meta tags to limit text or image use when generating search result snippets.

If you are a European press publisher, you should tell Search Console.

Using Search Console

Search Console offers a broad range of reports to help you monitor and optimize your site performance on Google Search.