A 2026 guide to explain exactly how Google ranks its search results

Businesses of all sizes want to appear on the first page of Google. Therefore, they will naturally spend time deliberating on how to get there.

Google wants to supply helpful and accurate results; it’s these answers to any given query that occupy the top spots on Google.

Therefore, search engine optimisation is the art form of creating content marketing that Google considers valuable.

However, as we shall elaborate on later, it’s not just Google’s decision-making that determines where a business ranks in search results.

It’s also how users use that information.

Do they spend a long time reading and digesting the information?

If so, that’s a solid win because it increases dwell time, which can help move the business up the rankings.

“sort through hundreds of billions of webpages to present the most relevant, useful results.”

Here’s what’s important when embarking on the process of improving your business’s search engine optimisation: Google has literally millions of pages it can choose from.

Sometimes, even billions of pages have been created to answer that very question. So, therefore, you do have to contemplate, well, why would

Google rank this at the top of the search results?

The answer is that the page needs to supply the best answer.

Tell me how Google ranks the search results.

Google ranks its search results using a large set of “ranking factors”. These are used to decipher the relevance of the page to the query that’s been asked, for example. Then there are quality factors, context and meaning. Then there’s a huge load of page experience factors.

Other factors include freshness, which basically means how recently that answer was written. This is important since the Google Freshness update.

Then what you can’t do is forget about links, that’s backlinks.

Now, because how Google sorts its results is a long-winded process, we need to break the process down stage by stage:

 

Step 1: Google Crawls and Indexes Pages

Crawling

Google employs a bot, called simply “Googlebot”, whose job is to crawl web pages.

Whether it’s a blog post on a website or a main page, Google has assigned a “crawl budget” to that page.

Now, the crawl budget basically dictates how long the bot will spend crawling and indexing the website.

Super important businesses, large e-commerce shops, or simply businesses ranking at the top of Google’s organic results will normally have a much higher crawl budget assigned.

Therefore, this is always why the best marketing companies make sure they make the best use of the available crawl budget. To do that, you can write a robots.txt document, which sets out clear instructions to Googlebot on which pages to crawl and which ones to index.

 

Indexing

Google then uses the “indexing” stage to determine whether or not the page should even be indexed.

It’s important to note that, because of the sheer volume of pages produced, all covering sometimes the same topic, Google has more than enough pages to choose from.

And because a shopper typically clicks only on the top or organic results, or perhaps has their answer satisfied by a Google AI Overview, not all of those pages will be needed.

Some, therefore, do get crawled by Googlebot, but they are not needed beyond that. Therefore, these pages are crawled but not indexed.

Therefore, sometimes writing low-quality blog posts is simply a total waste of time. The reason is that if Google already has millions of pages answering the same question, it simply doesn’t need another page answering it.

 

Relevance

Have you ever asked a question, only to find that the answer didn’t address it at all?

That’s annoying, right?

Well, Google knows this, and that is why, when a page is being indexed, the algorithm seeks to understand its relevance.

Now Google does this in a huge variety of different ways. Because of numerous sophisticated Google algorithm updates over the years, such as the major Google Hummingbird updates, Google has become very good at providing precise answers to any question you ask it.

 

Semantic search and Google’s Knowledge Graph

We could write a whole article on the subject of Google’s Knowledge Graph- and why is that so?

The answer is simple: it’s a fascinating Google project that helps us understand how everything interconnects.

From a company to its directors to its products and so on. Google uses a Google Knowledge Graph to understand things in the real world. It was once a hot topic of discussion to “move away from strings into things”.

This was basically the suggestion that backlinks are no longer as relevant as they once were, which turned out, in part, not to be true, and many SEO companies got that wrong.

They got that part wrong simply because, well, backlinks are still an important component of Google’s algorithm. They are very important, and so is Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Therefore, the better you can define your company, also known as an “entity”, the better your company can rank online. For example, by having good LinkedIn profiles and links from the main website to these. Showing authorship on each piece of content marketing, gaining backlinks from respected websites, and getting your brand mentioned in all the right places, such as websites with an extremely high DA score.

 

Google Assesses Content Quality (Google EEAT)

As you might expect, some businesses don’t want to implement SEO the right way. This means they cut corners, use spammy methods, and generally try to reach the top without putting in much effort. However you do this, it’s a surefire way to incur a Google penalty.

A Google penalty is something you want to avoid at all costs.

So, how do you do things the right way?

The short answer is that it involves a lot of work and effort. It means creating work, such as content marketing, that Google’s algorithm will deem accurate, trustworthy, and helpful to the end customer. Now, if you haven’t done so already, have a good read of the advice set out in

 

Google’s EEAT guidelines.

It basically sets out that Google rewards pages that show real expertise in what you’re writing about.

If the work, therefore, demonstrates expertise, experience, trustworthiness, and authoritativeness, then it ranks higher. Therefore, don’t just write 400 words that resemble a bit of a ramble; instead, write really high-quality advice.

 

Here are some pointers on how to best write content marketing:

• The information needs to be accurate
• You need to pack in as much knowledge and expertise as you can within the article
• Write engagingly and interestingly, as otherwise you lose the shoppers’ interest
• Keep the work up to date; return from time to time to update it.

 

Google measures page experience.

Google aims not only to provide a high-quality answer to a question but also to ensure the website is secure, as this offers a positive user experience.

A positive user experience means loading quickly, having a mobile version, and ensuring the website is more secure by implementing HTTPS.

Here are just some of the ways you can improve your website’s user experience

 

Load speed

This is important, so whether you own a brochure website with 7 pages or an e-commerce website with 1000+ pages, make sure your websites are fast.

The load speed is therefore important, as it ensures that the SEO company is observing your business’s Google Core Web Vitals.

 

Mobile usability.

Is there a mobile version of your website designed?

Is there, for example, an AMP version, or a mobile version, that’s been designed to offer a positive user experience?

Offering a positive user experience on both desktop and mobile is important to achieve high dwell time.
Security (HTTPS)

Website security is important; having HTTPS in place may not be something all shoppers consider before making a purchase. However, it is important because Google’s algorithm will take this into account when deciphering how secure say your e-commerce websites are.

 

Layout stability

This comes back to the previous point made about Google Web Core Vitals.

That is, you want the layout stability to be as fast as possible.

 

Readability and accessibility

Both readability and accessibility are also important to consider. If the shopper has to squint to read the text on a mobile phone, it will annoy them. The shopper will then leave, increasing the bounce rate.

 

Backlinks (they are still very important)

There’s no two ways about it, backlinks are still an important part of the SEO process.

No e-commerce team in particular will ever state that links are no longer important.

They are important because they help Google understand and appreciate how authoritative that business is.

If that business has, for example, a large number of high-quality links from well-respected brands, this can significantly improve the business’s search engine optimisation.

Why does Google keep updating its algorithm?

Google is simply fantastic at rewarding the best quality answers.

Therefore, Google’s algorithm doesn’t stagnate; it’s constantly being refined.

For example, significant updates include Google Panda, Penguin, and BERT, to name a few.

The purpose is therefore to surface the best answers at the top of Google. Now, the algorithm is constantly being improved to do just that.

However, Google always has another major job: to eliminate spam from its index.

Ever since the early days of Google’s inception, when it used Google’s legendary PageRank formula, businesses have been looking for ways to cheat the formula.

These methods of cutting corners, well, they don’t work. The reason they don’t work is that businesses may build, say, spam links.

This is why Google rolls out so many updates: it’s doing two jobs at once, making sure quality content marketing ranks much higher on Google. The second of those jobs the algorithm completes is ensuring that businesses that use spam methods are moved down in organic search rankings or completely de-indexed.

For those that do not know, to de-index a website means basically the website is still live and owned by the business. However, it is removed from Google’s index altogether because the business may have, for example, implemented a set of spam links.

 

Strong technical SEO is also important.

There’s so much to improving a business’s technical SEO, such as:

– Making sure the pages you want indexed can get indexed
– Making sure the pages you don’t want indexed, such as the CMS login page, cannot get indexed
– Making sure broken links are fixed
– Using 301 redirects to direct to new pages
– Making sure that duplicated pages are removed
– Removing AI-written content and replacing it with higher-quality written content marketing
– Removing the use of cloaking
– Making sure redirect loops are not occurring
– Using Google Web Core Vitals to ensure the website is faster
– And so much more

Expertise, especially for businesses covering YMYL subjects

Now, this is a really crucial point, so we want to convey it as clearly as possible.

That is, you could hire the best web designer in the land, but does your website convey that you are the experts on what you are selling?
So, therefore, this is where a large part of the search engine optimisation process is spent, that’s writing content marketing so good, it becomes clear and self-evident that you are the experts in that field.

 

Whether it be sports cars or say toffee, it really doesn’t matter what you sell; what is important is the following:

The content marketing answers commonly asked questions,

Its in-depth

It mustn’t be content thin, which means it doesn’t offer much useful information.

 

Google EEAT should be followed.

What would you say is the main thing that Google looks for when ranking pages?

Google primarily considers how relevant the page is to the searcher’s question.

This basically means how well the page answers the question.

If it’s clear that the author has put a lot of effort into writing the content marketing to provide a comprehensive answer, these pages rank higher.

However, it’s also important to note that Google looks at inbound backlinks to a page.

If, for example, a page has a lot of inbound or external backlinks with high DA scores, this will help. This can send what leading SEO consultants call link equity.

Link equity can determine how high a page ranks in Google Search Results.

Also, it’s down to other on-page factors, such as on-page optimisation.

For example, how well have the H1 through H6 tags been used?

How well have the meta title and meta description been written to improve the click-through rate?

 

Do backlinks still matter, or are they a waste of time?

Backlinks make a huge difference, so they need to be incorporated into your marketing strategy.

However, just before you go out and purchase a backlink-checking tool and spend hours on end building links, there are a few things you need to know.

 

When it comes to backlinks, quality matters so much.

That is, quality matters more than quantity. Now, let us elaborate on a common mistake that countless businesses make.

They notice that some websites have, say, 1000 links. They then believe, well, we need to build a huge number of links as well. However, they often forget two things: quality matters in link building. Then there’s also link velocity; you want to build the links slowly over a long period.

So, instead, they often build spam links or low-quality links with very low DA scores, and they also build them quickly in quick succession.

This, in turn, results in penalties being dished out. That is, Google’s algorithm then sees that the business has, say, hundreds of spam links, all built in a relatively short period, and then just like that, the website gets hit by a large algorithmic penalty.

This can mean that the business gets deindexed.

 

What should we do if we don’t have time to complete this work?

Search engine optimisation is massively time-consuming. This means, well, writing a single piece of content marketing that answers a question in detail can take the best part of a day.

Then there’s the monitoring of that piece of work, such as tracking the bounce rate.

If the bounce rate is high, well, this could be a surefire indication that the page is not answering the shopper’s question.

And content marketing, well, that’s only one part of the process.

As this long-winded article sets out, there’s also a lot of backlinks building and technical SEO that needs to be fixed.

So much to do.

Therefore, so many businesses come to us here at Walsh & Partners. We are one of the very best SEO companies in the UK. And how can we say that? Well, because we have SEO consultants who have now accumulated 14 years of experience.

Therefore, when it comes to content marketing, technical SEO, and link building, there’s not much we don’t know.

We therefore know how to help your business generate more sales.