Without doubt, the best search engine on the World Wide Web is Google! The success of the engine is a clear indication of the time and the effort the company spent in building it. Every search engine has its own set of algorithms that are used in the generation of search results and Google is no different from the rest in that respect. Their crawlers/spiders as well as an index of keywords, are crucial elements that play key roles in obtaining the most relevant results.
Apart from the keyword ranking in the search results, the point of differentiation between Google and other search engines is something known as SERP or Search Engine Results Page. Google has a trademarked algorithm called as PageRank, which is used in the scoring of web pages.
Criteria to decide the PageRank of websites:
The Location as well as the Frequency of the Keywords – it is essential to control the placement of the keywords as well as the keyword density. For example, the keyword appearing only once in the article will achieve it a considerably low score.
Existence of a webpage – New web pages and websites are created on a daily basis and not all of them have durability. This makes Google give preferences to websites that have a certain set history.
Webpage Backlinks – in the process of crawling through all the webpages online, Google also searches at the number of webpages that are linked to a particular website. This helps in sorting the sites based on relevance and priority.
The process of displaying the search results
You will have noticed that there is hardly a delay of a few seconds in typing the keywords in the search box and the engine displaying the corresponding page of relevant results. But how does Google find the relevant pages and how does it determine the order in which the results are displayed?
Before the advent of the ‘worldwide web’, search engines with information were scarce and they used programs like “archie” & “gopher” which indexed all the files and folders and stored them on online servers. Their process is listed below:-
Web Crawling
For a search engine to be able to search through a particular file, it must first be indexed. Specialised robots known as ‘spiders’ crawl through the millions of webpages for any information that you ask for. These spiders first create a list of all the different words that are found and used on the website itself.
Google Indexer
Before it begins crawling on the internet for the sites, the Googlebot first looks through the URLs that have been visited in the earlier sessions. This information is then compiled with the info taken from the webmasters and presents the results on your screen. This compiling is a results of crawling though each and every article on the relevant sites along with the density and the placement of the keywords.
Finally serving the results
This is the part that involves the most amount of work. Needless to say, this is a complicated procedure that requires computer generated algorithms. Although there is no concrete evidence on the working of this stage in any search engine, an SEO Expert company has the knowledge required to improve the rankings of sites. The right amount of keyword density and an appropriate page rank helps such SEO Expert companies ensure that your site has the top spot.
How can crawling and indexing be used for the benefit of your site?
One of the first things to improve your Google indexing and the rank of your site are to ensure that the Googlebots crawl through them and consequently index them appropriately. Dead or even broken links have a considerably negative impact on your webpage. You can also resort to the use of webmaster tools. Improving the rank of your website is merely question of following certain guidelines set by Google itself.
