How exactly do search engines like Google work?

 

 

Author: Ryan Walsh

Date of publication: 01/07/2025

Table of contents:

• How do Google/search engines work?
• How do Google/search engines discover brand-new pages?
• How does Google work out where a business should be ranked in Google’s results?
• How do search engines determine if a piece of content marketing is of good quality or not?
• How to turn your business knowledge into better rankings

Shoppers worldwide ask Google billions of different questions every day.

SEO agencies refer to these as “queries”, which is just a question. It’s a marketer’s job to match these questions with high-quality content marketing, enabling businesses to increase sales.

As we all know, if a business can position itself at the top of Google, it can attract a large number of visitors who will flood to the site.
Shoppers can arrive at a website in a multitude of different ways, through paid ads, such as using Google Ads or via a Google Business listing.

However, in this article, we are more interested in organic traffic, the visitors that a business can obtain from the free positions on Google.

We are the masters at helping businesses rank higher organically. We want your business to be able to do the same. For this to happen, you’re going to need a basic understanding of how search engines, such as Google, work.

 

Queries

As these shoppers have entered a query relating to your product or the services you sell, they will be actively interested in your offerings.

Marketing experts refer to this as “inbound marketing” – essentially, you’re not chasing the customer; they’re coming to you because they want what you have to offer.

Now, all of you knew that already, right?

However, what you might know is how the search engines work. How can you get your business to the top of Google?

How can you get the blog post you’ve been writing for 10 hours, sitting and sipping espressos, to rank at the top of Google?

Well, it’s a complex process, but we’ll break it down for you and make it as simple as possible.

 

For the impatient among you, here’s the short version:

– Crawling and indexing
– If indexed, how strong are the businesses’ ranking factors
– Rank the website
– Monitor its engagement in terms of dwell times and bounce rates
– Then continually adjust where the page should rank based on engagement from shoppers and whether the SEO improves or not
Sounds simple, right?

 

If only it were, it’s not that simple. That’s because for highly competitive industries, ranking number 1 on Google organically could draw in millions of pounds of revenue every year.

So, businesses don’t let such a competitive advantage slip through their hands without a fight.

This is why top search engine optimisation agencies are in such high demand, as current and up-to-date knowledge can have a profound impact on a business’s profitability.

 

How Do Search Engines Work?

Sock it to me, how do the search engines work?

Search engines are essentially online libraries.

In the past, you might wander into a library, and the librarian would help you find the book you wanted to see.

However, Google is not much different from a library; all it is is that the librarian has been replaced with an algorithm.

An algorithm so powerful, so refined, it’s like a masterpiece, which can help find the exact answer that you want.

Therefore, Google is like having a librarian in your pocket, ready to serve the best book or page to answer the question you want.

Now, it’s up to us as businesses to ensure that the content marketing we write is of the highest quality. We want search engines, such as

Google, to identify our page as the best possible answer to that query —that’s where we, as marketing companies, come into the fold.

Now is not a walk in the park

It’s not going to come to you easily

Why?

Because any page you write, whether it’s about the moon landings or the best and most comfy slippers you can buy, will be competing with millions of other pages.

Therefore, your page must be deemed as supplying a better answer to the customer. That is not straightforward; it requires enormous effort on the part of the marketing company.

However, the good news is that a single page, of very high quality, ranks for a high-volume search term, which could potentially rank at the top of Google. Many shoppers globally could be reading your work, saying these guys know their stuff; I am buying from them.

So, is it worth all that effort, all those espressos?

Indeed, this is why the world’s largest companies invest so heavily in this process. Because if you get your website to the top for high-volume keywords, well, it can be massively advantageous for those businesses, because it can bring in a flood of new customers.

 

 

How do search engines work out where a page should rank?

 

It is a 3-stage process which involves:

Crawling

Googlebot, along with the other bots used by different search engines, will need to crawl and index the page.
Think of a giant spider; its job is to follow links, spot new pages, and notice changes made to existing pages.

This stage is called the crawling stage.

 

Indexing

This occurs when Google determines that the page is of good quality and, therefore, decides to index it and store that content in Google’s index.

Because thousands of people globally write articles such as “What is content marketing?” daily, Google must decipher what is of high quality, what is well-written, what is worth storing as an answer, and what is not worth indexing.

If the content marketing is low quality, it won’t get indexed.

 

Ranking

Google then uses a wide range of different ranking factors, from page speed to the quality of your business’s backlinks, to determine how strong the search engine optimisation is for that page.

Now, we have oversimplified things here, but here’s what you need to remember: there are well more than 200 ranking factors. Then you have user experience factors, such as whether the shopper is sticking around, resulting in a very high dwell time, or whether they are leaving.

Ranking factors can include backlinks, as well as your business’s content marketing. In a nutshell, you need to dedicate time to improving all of these aspects, which is essential if your company wants to rank at the top of Google’s search results.

And here’s the thing: we don’t want to complicate things, but remember that some ranking factors are more important than others. You could spend a lifetime adjusting and rewriting your business’s alt text, yet it may not have a significant impact on your company’s ranking on Google.

On the other hand, obtaining the best backlink profile in your industry can have a significant impact. Your business is then likely to move substantially up Google’s rankings.

Crawling and indexing

The search engines use something called “web crawlers”- your SEO agency might also refer to these as “spiders” or “bots. However, the company describes them as essentially bots whose job is to constantly visit businesses’ websites and check if new pages or edits have been made to a website.

For example, you’ve rewritten the ‘About Us’ page, as you’ve transitioned from a one-person band to a larger company employing over 50 staff. This page will then need to be recrawled by Googlebot, allowing Google to update its index and serve the latest page to shoppers.

 

How do the web crawlers work?

Think of the web crawlers as big spiders. Now, if you’re scared of spiders, we apologise, but it helps to understand how they work.

The spiders follow links; they navigate from one business website to another by following two different types of links. Those links are both the inbound links to the page and the internal links.

Think, therefore, of the spiders crawling through the pages, finding different pages through the links.

This is why, when you’re having your website designed or chatting with the web designer, it’s a good idea always to add internal links.

Additionally, the SEO agency must also be diligent in building external links, which can help new pages get crawled and indexed more quickly. The more quality links, the faster Googlebot is likely to discover that page.

Additionally, high-quality links can help make your website more authoritative, which can aid in achieving higher rankings.

What can make Googlebot’s job harder?

Googlebot can read JavaScript; however, it often has to perform additional rendering steps, as most good SEO businesses advise, because pages written using a lot of JavaScript can be very difficult to read. However, with additional rendering steps, the page can become readable.

Additionally, if the website owner uses meta robots tags, this can block website crawlers, such as Googlebot.

Now, sometimes a robot tags page can be used to block Googlebot from indexing the page for good reason. That’s because the business might want to use its crawl budget more effectively, as it doesn’t want Googlebot wasting time crawling and indexing a page that it doesn’t want to appear in its index. A good example is the content management system login page, which is of no use to the shopper, as it should only be used by business owners.

Therefore, sometimes a meta robots tag can be used to help preserve the crawl budget.

However, sometimes a business can incorrectly state that it doesn’t want a page indexed, when it should be. The result is that the page will never be displayed in Google’s results, which means it won’t attract customers. Therefore, do make sure that the pages listed in your meta robots tags, in terms of no indexation, are the pages you don’t want indexed, if they are mentioned as no-index

 

Crawl budget- what does this mean?

The crawl budget is straightforward; it’s simply the amount of time the search engine crawlers have.

What are the two factors that can determine how much time Google spends crawling your website?
Crawl demand

This depends on how popular the business’s website is, as well as how frequently it updates and adds new pages.
For example, the Sky News website is likely to have a very high crawl budget, because it’s being updated regularly.

 

Crawl capacity

This is how quickly the company website responds to a crawler request. What is meant by this is that if the website’s hosting is extremely slow, then Google is likely to spend a longer time on the website because the hosting is too slow.
If the hosting is super sonic, then the crawlers are likely to spend longer on the website because it is faster.

 

Is it essential to have a sitemap?

Having a sitemap is essential, whether you have a large e-commerce website or a brochure website.

A site map can detail all the essential pages on a website and list them in a single, comprehensive view.

This is very useful for the bots, as it then has a list of pages which it can crawl.

Expert tip:

If you have a WordPress website, adding an XML sitemap is a straightforward process that can be completed with just a few clicks. For example, in the United Kingdom, many businesses prefer to use the Yoast Plugin, which offers a free version that allows you to add an XML sitemap.

 

How does Google determine which pages should be indexed?

Google algorithms

Your top SEO experts globally will often spend most of their waking hours thinking about how Google’s algorithms work.
The reason is simple: the Google algorithm doesn’t stay the same for months on end. Google engineers continually work on improving its quality.

Therefore, your top-quality SEO agencies have to figure out how Google’s algorithm works, and it’s a bit like figuring out how to solve a

Rubik’s Cube; well, somebody else is jumbling up the order as you speak.

That’s because Google’s algorithm is constantly undergoing improvements, updates, and core algorithm updates. This means that the algorithm is improving, and as such, businesses need to make sure that they are implementing the best white-hat methods.

 

What are “Google ranking factors”

Ever wondered how two different businesses in the same city can rank so differently?
One reining supreme at the top of Google, getting all of the attention in the number one spot, then another business that is on page 10 of Google?

Well, it boils down to this: how strong are the business’s ranking factors?

Businesses with the best content marketing, strongest links, and all technical SEO issues fixed rank higher.

The businesses with “content thin” pages, low-quality spam links, and numerous broken internal links will render their technical SEO weak, resulting in lower rankings.

Therefore, it comes down to how strong the businesses’ ranking factors are; are they strong and white hat? Or are they weak and spammy? If so, the company runs the risk of being “de-indexed,” which means that Google has noticed you are trying to cut too many corners, attempting to “game” the algorithm into thinking you are better than your SEO is. This is a one-way street, resulting in the business incurring a penalty.

 

It comes down to this: Are you offering the best possible answer to that question?

Take a second out of your busy day.

It’s time to levitate just for a second.

You might be a busy bee, high on caffeine and writing so many articles that your fingertips hurt. You might be so obsessed with building links that it consumes you, as you want your new business venture to succeed.

However, what many companies become obsessed with is doing more, more, and a bit more.

You’re on a one-way street to burnout and overoptimization of your website; you have to stop and take a step back for a second.

And think, from a bird’s-eye view, for a second about that, what is Google trying to do?

It’s trying to supply the best answer to any query it’s asked.
Then, return and review your business’s content marketing, and compare it to the answers ranking 1st, 2nd, and 3rd on Google.

 

How does your work compare?

If it doesn’t come close in terms of quality, offering sound advice, or providing helpful guidance, how will your business surpass that work?

It won’t, is the simple answer.

So the content marketing has to be better, and you can be better than the content marketing that is already out there by doing the following:
– Offer the best advice (sounds simple, yet harder to do in reality)
– Offer more expert advice by incorporating the views of more experts into the content marketing
– Demonstrate and show your experience. If you have 25 years of experience running a business, is this demonstrated in the content marketing?

 

– Links = authority, so are there quality links leading to the right pages
– Google E-EAT, do you understand it? Have you incorporated this into each of your articles that you want to rank high on Google/
– Google Helpful Content update: Is the work helpful? Is it as beneficial as you can make it?
–

Turn your company’s knowledge into better rankings.

A company should write high quality content marketing.
The work, whether it’s a product page or a blog post should be well written and have a high E-EAT score.

 

List of sources:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/how-search-workshttps://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/overviewhttps://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/large-site-managing-crawl-budget

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots-meta-tag

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking-systems-guide

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-contenthttps://search.google.com/search-console/about

https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-ranking-factors