Learn SEO Basics Online

Serving Results

Once ranked, the engine displays results on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

• It includes organic results, ads, featured snippets, videos, etc.

• The layout and ranking can change depending on your device, location, and intent.

UNDERSTANDING HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK

Search engines like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo work through a multi-step process to find, index, and rank web content so users can easily get relevant results. Here’s a simplified breakdown of how search engines work:

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1. Crawling

Search engines use automated programs called crawlers or spiders to browse the internet.

• They start with known webpages (like popular sites).

• Then follow links from those pages to discover new content.

• They collect information like text, images, videos, metadata, and links.

 Think of crawlers as digital librarians that scan every book (website) they find.

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2. Indexing

After crawling, the data is stored and organized in a massive database called the index.

• The index includes keywords, page content, site structure, freshness, and more.

• It enables fast lookups so when you search, results can be found in milliseconds.

 Indexing is like creating a massive, searchable catalog of every webpage.

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3. Ranking (Algorithm)

When you type a query, the search engine uses a complex algorithm to rank pages from the index.

It considers hundreds of factors, including:

• Relevance to your query

• Keyword usage on the page

• Page quality (e.g., expertise, trustworthiness)

• Backlinks (how many other websites link to it)

• User experience (page speed, mobile-friendliness)

• Freshness of the content

• Location and search history (for personalization)

Before getting into the water, it’s essential to understand how a search engine works. Let’s take the example of Google, which in 2017 represented just over 90% of the search engine market share.

You should know that search engines operate on a very precise algorithm to classify the web pages of a site within the “SERP”, in other words, the search engine results pages. For example, to give a page of results to the user according to his request, Google uses an algorithm based on a multitude of criteria which we will see later.

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WORK YOUR REFERENCING ACCORDING TO GOOGLE ALGORITHM AND ITS FILTERS

Understand how google works

To have a maximum of traffic within its search engine and to offer answers to the expectations of Internet users, Google seeks to classify the best quality sites, in other words sites accessible by all Internet users, navigable on any medium. , and responding as much as possible to their requests. To keep only quality sites, Google has implemented two filters to downgrade web pages in search results: Google Panda and Google Penguin. Let us quickly examine these two cases.

The Google Panda filter aims to downgrade poor quality sites that do not meet Google standards. These quality standards refer to the fundamentals that we will discuss later in this article.

Another filter implemented since 2012 by Google is Google Penguin. This one has another functionality than Google Panda. Indeed, this filter is mainly interested in bad jasa SEO practices which aim to inflate the popularity of a site via abusive linking, not respecting Google standards.

AN EVOLVING RESEARCH ENGINE

Google claims to perform around 500 optimizations of its algorithm each year, which makes a lot of criteria to take into account, grouped into several large families that form the basis of natural referencing.

Let’s take a concrete example: from the outset, a site’s PageRank allows Google to rank a site’s web pages in results pages. PageRank is an index assigned to each page of a site and which is based on the analysis of links between web pages. How does this index work? This is very simple, the more inbound links a page has, the higher its index. The more the index (PR) of this page increases, the more it distributes PageRank to outgoing links. Generally we equate the PageRank of a site to that of its home page, because it is the page which has the best index compared to the other pages of the site. If you want to know more about links, here is one of our articles about the impact of links. Today, PageRank is still current in the classification criteria of web pages, but is no longer made public (what is called the PageRank Toolbar has indeed disappeared).