We've moved! Visit
The Keyword
for small business news, stories and resources.
Small Business
Tips and tricks for managing your business with Google’s solutions
Webmaster Academy: How Search Works
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Many of the questions we get from webmasters boil down to “How does Google work?” What most webmasters are really asking is, how do I get my site to appear in search results? The first step of this answer is that your site needs to be discovered and comprehended by search engines, and understanding the fundamentals of how search works will help with this.
Google has lots of computers that continually visit and analyze web pages it knows about. These computers are collectively known as Googlebot. We give Googlebot an initial set of sites, then send it out to visit those sites. It scans the content, and then follows links to other sites or pages that it finds. It then repeats the process on each page it lands on, and continues to spider out, hence the term "spidering" or "crawling" many use to refer to a search engine's discovery process.
When Googlebot visits a webpage, it downloads and stores a copy (called a “cached” page) to our index. It analyzes each page, noting the words and any other relevant content. Googlebot understands some types of content, like text, better than others, like images or Flash (you can find some ways to make these better understood in
Webmaster Academy
). In order to perform well when customers search for you, it’s important that Googlebot can access and understand the content of your website.
Each time someone searches on Google, our ranking algorithms draw up a list of relevant webpages from the index of information that Googlebot has saved while “crawling” the web. This list is given back as the Google Search results page. To see if your website is included in Google’s index, you can use the site search operator, restricting search results to your site’s domain. For example a search for [
site:youtube.com
] would only show results from the website youtube.com.
For a more visual look at Google Search, check out the How Search Works video below:
If you’re interested, there’s a lot more to learn that’ll help you build your online presence at the
Webmaster Academy
. In our next post, we’ll explain best practices for brick and mortar business owners.
Posted by Garen Checkly, Search Quality Team
Labels
Brazil
1
Business Photos
2
Chromebooks
1
consumer surveys
1
Economic Impact Report
3
Education
1
English
419
Events
3
Get Your Business Online
7
Gmail
8
GoMo
1
Google Ads
61
Google AdSense
4
Google Analytics
7
Google App Engine
1
Google Apps
60
Google Apps for Work
2
Google Calendar
6
Google Docs
18
Google Domains
3
Google Forms
1
Google Maps
15
google my business
16
Google Offers
1
Google Partners
2
Google Places
45
Google ReWork
1
Google Search
6
Google Shopping
2
Google Sites
7
Google Small Business
20
Google Small Business Blog
419
Google Small Business Community
9
Google Tags
4
Google+
9
Google+ stories
8
Help Desk Hangouts On Air
20
Holiday
3
Learn with Google
4
Livestream
1
Local Services
3
marketing
1
mobile
13
mobile optimization
4
mobile sites
4
Mobile Speed
1
National Small Business Week
3
Newsletter
3
Online security
3
Primer
2
Research
1
reviews
1
Rio de Janeiro
1
Road Trip
1
site design
1
Small Business Saturday
1
Small Business Week
4
Street View
1
TalkBin
2
Test My Site
1
Training
2
Webmaster Academy
2
YouTube
7
Archive
2018
Dec
Oct
Jul
Apr
Feb
Jan
2017
Oct
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
2016
Nov
Oct
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
2013
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Feed
Follow @googlesmallbiz
Follow
Site Feed
Follow
