How do search engines work? A Crash Course in Internet Ranking

How will your website rank in 2018? It´s a new year to make the best of your website and business.

Search engines. We use them every day. Google reports over 1 trillion searches a year, and with smart devices and information on-the-go, this number will continue to rise. But have you ever stopped to wonder, how do search engines work?

Imagine that the internet is a city with many different kinds of buildings in each area.

The search engine needs to crawl through the entire city, sifting through every building and room. They will seek the easiest path to do so: links.

In an internet city where links are the fastest shortcuts to different “buildings” (pages), crawlers go through every room to reach the billions of interconnected websites. These automated robots decipher the code from each website and deposit this information in the many data centers that have been constructed by search engines. This information must be processed extremely quickly when a person does a search.

If the site is big and the content requires multiple clicks away from the landing page, the crawler robots may actually give up. Thus, it is important that links, images, and content are as close to the landing page as possible if you want your page to be found.

Relevance and popularity

Search engines seek to give you the best answer. Whenever you perform a search, the search engine scans its billions of data to find the most relevant results to the search, as well as the most popular results.

The ranking and retrieval step is the most complicated of all the steps of asking how do search engines work. The ranking algorithm checks your search against billions of pages –an operation so complex that the search engine companies guard the confidentiality of their algorithms. These industry secrets provide a competitive advantage as being able to give you the best results, and also to prevent people from gaming the system.

SEO and Keywords

People have been exploiting the ranking algorithms since the beginning of search engines, but Google and other engines continue to refine their tools to ensure that this doesn’t happen. For example, sites used to do “keyword stuffing” : filling the pages with basically nonsense and the keywords everywhere. Thus, linking was introduced: more important and popular sites would be more linked, and those with more “authority” (think governmental websites) carry more weight. Thus, if the government links to your site, it will be ranked as more important than if a blog linked to you.

In sum, the exact formula for the algorithm is even more unknown, and “Search Engine Optimization” has become a whole new playing field. The best advice now is to focus on creating valuable content and an easy user experience. Not too surprising, right?

If you find yourself asking, how do search engines work or want to improve your website’s ranking online, call us at Farotech for a free consultation.

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source https://farotech.com/blog/search-engines-work-crash-course-internet-ranking/