How Google works
How does Google work? How does it index and crawl web pages? In this article we will see how to appear in search engines and, therefore, get visits to our website.
What is Google? What are search engines?
Before we start talking about how Google works, it is important to know what is Google or known as search engines. Search engines are programs designed to search, classify or display information stored on the internet, a platform, etc. Google uses bots or web crawlers that explore the web collecting all the information about the different pages of each server. Users also use search engines through concepts they have searched for, called keywords.
What is crawling?
The crawling or crawlingis the first step that Google takes to decide what and how web pages should appear in its search results. The Google bot determines which pages exist, the information they contain and how they should be positioned through the links it finds.
The sitemap: the entrance to our website
The sitemap is an essential tool in the structure and accessibility of a website, as it acts as a roadmap for search engines. It allows to understand how the web information is organized and facilitates the crawling and indexing of the pages to the search robot. Therefore, if we want a page to gain visibility, it is very important to have a sitemap created and configured correctly. Otherwise, it can negatively affect the visibility of the website in the results.
How do I tell Google which pages to crawl on a website?
The robots.txt file tells search engines which parts of the web page they can and cannot crawl, preventing the web page from being overloaded with unnecessary requests. A web page blocked by robots.txt files may end up being indexed after a while.
How to attract the attention of Google’s robot to visit my website?
As we have previously mentioned, the sitemap is the gateway to a web page and from here and through a good internal linking strategy is essential for a correct web positioning. In addition, the Google robot tends to visit pages with fresh, updated and continuous content, so having a web content strategy is essential.
Pages that bots don’t crawl: duplicate and private content
To continue discovering how Google works, another key element is to know which pages it indexes and which it crawls, knowing what Google does not like as duplicate content. It is essential to create original content on unique pages! Also, those pages where it is necessary to log in or create a login account are not crawled by Google’s robot, so it is not necessary to include them in the content strategy to be optimized.
Web indexing: appearing in the search results index
When the Google robot has already crawled the page, the next step will be to interpret the content such as text, images, videos, etc., to index it in its index of results. Having a website with a good SEO strategy will allow you to obtain greater visibility in search engines.
What aspects to work on so that Google indexes our page?
In order to index our web page correctly, obtain better results and get more visits, we must work on aspects such as:
- Structure and headings. It is very important that the pages and blogs follow a logical structure and always correctly label the main headings with the tag
How do we tell Google which pages to index?
Generally, pages are published in “index” format, a tag that indicates to Google that a page can be indexed and appear in search engines. For a page not to appear in Google’s index, the “noindex” tag must be used.
Sample and publication of results
Finally, depending on how the website is designed, Google will display the pages according to the searches made by users in the search engine. It is very important to work SEO On page and SEO Off page strategies, to get the best results in the search engine index. If you still have doubts about how Google works, please contact us at info@orvitdigital.com or in our contact section!
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