{"id":19284,"date":"2018-07-17T13:53:49","date_gmt":"2018-07-17T18:53:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hostgator.com\/blog\/?p=19284"},"modified":"2018-07-30T19:12:32","modified_gmt":"2018-07-31T00:12:32","slug":"how-search-engines-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hostgator.com\/blog\/how-search-engines-work\/","title":{"rendered":"How Do Search Engines Work?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"how<\/p>\n

SEO 101: How Search Engines Work<\/h2>\n

So much of your business depends on being visible in the search engines. You\u2019d like to try to understand this thing that has so much power over your success.<\/p>\n

But figuring out how search engines work can be really confusing. And it\u2019s not just you.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a whole industry based around trying to understand which sites rank for which reasons, and even the information we do know is changing all the time.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t provide an extensive rundown of how the Google algorithm works for you (no one can), but we can<\/em> provide some basic information on how search engines work that may help remove some of the mystery. Here are a few of the main things you should know.<\/p>\n

\"HostGator<\/a><\/p>\n

The Search Engine\u2019s Goals<\/h2>\n

The first thing to understand about how search engines work is that their priority is providing the best possible results for what the searcher is looking for<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

When it comes to the natural results, the search engine is not concerned about how much a particular website owner might want to grab those top spots or think you deserve it they only care about the people searching.<\/p>\n

By providing the information people need, a search engine can ensure those people keep coming back to use the site again. We know how well that\u2019s worked for Google many of us use it every day.<\/p>\n

That primary goal leads into the secondary goal that generates the company\u2019s profits: making money on ads.<\/strong> Businesses pay to advertise on search engines in large part because they know a huge number of people use them every day. As long as Google keeps its users satisfied and coming back, advertisers will continue to keep the company profitable.<\/p>\n

So the search engine\u2019s main concern is therefore how to make sure the results it delivers provide the most useful information for the consumer\u2019s query. That\u2019s where things start to get complicated.<\/p>\n

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Search Engine Index<\/h2>\n

For a search engine to be able to identify the right web page for every possible query (or come as close as possible to such a lofty goal), it has to have a record of all the possible web pages online, along with some understanding of what\u2019s on each of them. To do that, search engines create a massive index of web pages.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This index attempts to identify and organize every website and web page on the web in a way that allows it to draw connections between the keywords people search for and the content included on each page.<\/p>\n

On top of all that, it needs to be able to assign relative quality to different web pages that cover the same topic. \u00a0This is tricky since all of this is happening with machines. People have a hard enough time agreeing on what constitutes 'quality'\u009d content, but search engines have to determine it based on factors that machines can measure objectively.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Website Crawlers<\/h2>\n

The first challenge<\/em> of creating a search engine index is identifying all the web pages out there<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This part of the job is up to website crawlers. Each time a website crawler discovers a page, it crawls the page, collecting all the relevant information on it needed for the search engine index. With that page added to the index, it then uses every link on that page to find new pages to crawl<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"how<\/p>\n

Website owners can speed up the process of getting a website crawled by the search engines by submitting a sitemap and using internal linking.<\/strong> This is the easy part.<\/p>\n

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Search Engine Algorithms<\/h2>\n

The second challenge<\/em> of the search engine index is the much more complicated one: attributing relative value to all of the web pages<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

If the website crawler finds 100,000 pages that include content on them it deems relevant to a specific term, how does the search engine decide what order to deliver those results in?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where the search engine algorithm comes into play. Engineers at each of the big search engine companies have spent untold hours developing a complicated algorithm that uses a number of factors to assign relative value to websites and web pages.<\/p>\n

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Ranking Factors<\/h3>\n

While there are many different factors that go into determining exactly why one page will rank over another many more than we can summarize here, and more even than the greatest SEO expert knows we have an idea of some of the most important search engine ranking factors<\/a> Google and the other search engines take into account:<\/p>\n