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This blog explains that sometimes Google would find a data center that had old data, and sometimes it'd hit one containing new data. After Google crawls the web, it indexes the pages it finds. So, say Google has crawled a large fraction of the web, and within that portion of the web, it's looking at each web page. From this blog, I learned that Google uses crawlers to find every website it can to give you the most reliable source.

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Unless you're an SEO expert, it's no surprise if you're mystified by the inner-workings of Google search. How on Earth does Google decide how to rank the pages on your website? If this question has ever crossed your mind, keep reading. This post should simplify things for you.

Yesterday, Google's head of web spam, Matt Cutts, published a video on the GoogleWebmasterHelp YouTube channel called "How does Google search work?" In the video, Cutts addresses the following question he received in the Google Webmaster Help Forum:
Hi Matt, could you please explain how Google's ranking and website evaluation process works starting with the crawling and analysis of a site, crawling timelines, frequencies, priorities, indexing and filtering processes within the databases etc. - RobertvH, Munich
"So that's basically just like, tell me everything about Google. Right?" Cutts chuckles.

All kidding aside, this isn't an unreasonable question -- but it's not an easy one to answer, either. The Google search ranking algorithm is a big, hairy beast, taking into account a variety of factors (over 200, in fact) to deliver the best results to Google searchers. But sometimes the most helpful explanation is the simplest one. As Cutts states in the video, he could spend hours and hours talking about how Google search works, but he was nice enough to parse it into the following 8-minute video. Without further ado, here's the video, accompanied by a written breakdown of what Cutts says in the video (via the transcript provided by Search Engine Land), from crawling to indexing to ranking by Google search:

How Google Crawls the Web

Crawling Then

In the video, Cutts explains how Google used to crawl the web, which was a long and drawn out process. Google would crawl for 30 days -- that's right, over the course of several weeks! Afterward, Google would take about a week to index what it found, and then it'd push that data out through the search engine, which would also take a week. "And so that was what the Google dance was," says Cutts.

Sometimes Google would find a data center that had old data, and sometimes it'd hit one containing new data. To make this more efficient, after Google crawled for 30 days, it'd recrawl pages with a high PageRank (a Google ranking factor that ranks web pages by how many other pages link to it, and how reputable those pages are), such as the CNN homepage, to see if anything new or important had been published. But Cutts admits that, for the most part, this was not a great process, since search results would quickly be out of date considering the 30-day crawl time.

Crawling Now

Today, things are a bit different. Cutts admits that Google still uses PageRank as the primary determinant in its ranking algorithm. The better PageRank your web page has, the more likely that Google will discover that page relatively early in the crawl. For example, crawling in strict PageRank order, Google would find the CNNs and The New York Times of the world, as well as other very high PageRank websites, first.

In 2003, Cutts remarks, as part of an update called Update Fritz, Google switched to crawling a significant chunk of the web every day. Google broke the web into various segments and Google crawled that part of the web, refreshing it every night. In other words, at any given point, Google's main base index would only be so out of date, because then it'd loop back around and refresh it with the newly crawled pages. This was a much more efficient way to crawl since, rather than waiting for everything to finish, Google was incrementally updating its index. "And we've gotten even better over time," says Cutts. And at this point, Google search has gotten very fresh; any time there are updates, Google can usually find them very quickly.

As a comparison, Cutts talks about how in the early days of Google, it'd have a supplemental index in addition to the main/base index. The supplemental index was something that Google wouldn't crawl and refresh quite as often, and it also consisted of a lot more web pages. So essentially, Google would have really fresh content not only from the layer of its main index, but also from other pages that weren't refreshed quite as often, which Google has a lot more of.

How Google Indexes Web Pages

After Google crawls the web, it indexes the pages it finds. So say Google has crawled a large fraction of the web, and within that portion of the web, it's looking at each web page. To explain how indexing is done, Cutts uses the search term 'Katy Perry' as an example:
"In a document, Katy Perry appears right next to each other. But what you want in an index is which documents does the word Katy appear in, and which documents does the word Perry appear in? So you might say Katy appears in documents 1, and 2, and 89, and 555, and 789. And Perry might appear in documents number 2, and 8, and 73, and 555, and 1,000. And so the whole process of doing the index is reversing, so that instead of having the documents in word order, you have the words, and they have it in document order."
In other words, what indexing says is, "Okay, these are all the web pages a search term appears in."

How Google Ranks Web Pages in Search Results

The last piece of the puzzle is how Google ranks which pages appear for the search terms someone types into Google. In the video, Cutts continues his Katy Perry example.

So for instance, if someone visits Google.com and types 'Katy Perry,' Google thinks, "Okay, what web pages might match 'Katy Perry'?" If web page 1 has 'Katy' but not 'Perry,' and web page 2 has 'Perry' but not 'Katy,' those two are out of the running. If web page 5 has both 'Katy' and 'Perry,' it's a possibility. Furthermore, web pages 89 and 73 would be out because they also don't have the right combination of words. If web page 555 has both 'Katy' and 'Perry,' it's still in as well.

So when searchers visit Google.com and type in whatever their search term is, whether it's 'Chicken Little,' 'Britney Spears,' 'Matt Cutts,' 'Katy Perry,' or something else, Google finds the pages it believes contains those words, either on the page itself, in backlinks to the page, or in anchor text pointing to the page. Once Google has completed what is called 'Document Selection,' it tries to figure out how to rank those pages. It's a tricky thing, says Cutts, since Google takes into consideration PageRank as well as over 200 other factors when deciding whether a web page is really authoritative, and how to rank it.

For example, one page may have a good reputation because it has a high PageRank, but it also may only have the word 'Perry' in it once, and it might just happen to have the word 'Katy' somewhere else on the page. On the other hand, there might be a page that has the words 'Katy' and 'Perry' right next to each other (so it has proximity), and the page also has a good reputation with a lot of links pointing to it.

Therefore, Google tries to balance that -- relevancy and authority -- to surface reputable pages that are also about what the searcher is looking for. But it's not as simple as that, considering Google is taking those 200+ different ranking factors into consideration in order to provide searchers with the best results. In the video, Cutts refers to this as "the secret sauce."

Google Search in a Nutshell

At the end of the video, Cutts simplifies his Google search explanation even further.

At any given time, he says, hundreds of millions of times a day, a searcher comes to Google and types a search term like 'Katy Perry.' Then, Google sends that search query out to hundreds of different machines simultaneously. These machines then look through their tiny fraction of the web that Google has indexed and return the pages they think are the best matches for the search term. Then Google tries to determine "the crème de la crème." The "needle in the haystack." The best pages that match the search query across Google's entire index. Finally, Google takes those pages and displays them to the searcher in ranked order, along with a useful snippet, showing the search terms in the context of the page. And, as Cutts says, "you get it all back in under half a second."

Understanding Search as a Marketer

Cutts' simple explanation is helpful for marketers who are just starting to understand the importance of search engine optimization in marketing -- or for marketers who are trying to explain its value to others, such as their bosses. However, in order to effectively search engine optimize their website and its content, marketers need a deeper, richer understanding of those other 200+ ranking factors Google takes into account when deciding how to rank web pages. For more information about SEO, download our Introduction to Search Engine Optimization ebook here. And because Google is constantly updating its ranking algorithm, stay tuned to this blog for the latest news about how important Google algorithm updates affect marketers.

Image Credit: twinsparc

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Unless you're an SEO expert, it's no surprise if you're mystified by the inner-workings of Google search. How on Earth does Google decide how to rank the pages on your website? If this question has ever crossed your mind, keep reading. This post should simplify things for you.

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This article/blog explains that the search engine giant uses software called web crawlers to basically mimic the same web-browsing behavior you do. The masterminds behind Google's search engine need to be constantly learning how to provide accurate, relevant answers to new inquiries, because people are just going to keep on asking. I learned that Google has to keep their algorithm a secret so no one could figure out how to override the system.

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There are over 1 billion websites online

Minerva Studio/shutterstock

The Internet reached the 1 billion milestone in September of 2014, but the number of unique URLs living online reaches into the trillions. These webpages cover everything from news and social media to sites that give you access to free books, coupons, and more. (To compare, there were only 3,000 in 1994.) Google crawls each one by following links from site to site.

Fifteen percent of a day's searches are completely new

"How can I lose weight fast?" "What's up with Queen Elizabeth's neon outfits?" Google is no stranger to these often-asked questions. However, the masterminds behind Google's search engine need to be constantly learning how to provide accurate, relevant answers to new inquiries, because people are just going to keep on asking. In other words, you're teaching Google how to best present the right page for the right search.

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Google made over 1,600 improvements to search in 2016 alone

Photo by bradleypjohnson via Flickr (<a href='https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">CC BY 2.0</a>) CC BY 2.0)"}' />

For example, when you search for directions, you get a map of your route rather than a list of instructions. Sometimes you get a direct answer to your question, if it's something like "When does this coffee shop open?" or "What time is the show tonight?" Google partners with businesses to give you that info without searching through webpages. Now, you may even get hired, thanks to Google's new job search engine.

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Minerva Studio/shutterstock The Internet reached the 1 billion milestone in September of 2014, but the number of unique URLs living online reaches into the trillions. These webpages cover everything from news and social media to sites that give you access to free books, coupons, and more. (To compare, there were only 3,000 in 1994.)

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This is an article is on a website that explains how to improve your search ranking. This article explains that It’s Google’s mission to provide its users with the best possible information related to the search query it has been asked by a user. Google employs a robot which crawls the Internet gathering and downloading information about every website in existence. It adds this information to the “Google Index”, which is then called upon every time a search is made. I learned that Web Crawlers return more information to the Google Index when they're done searching.

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Today we discuss a mighty secret, one nobody at Google HQ wants you to know about. Yes, we're going to explain to you exactly how Google works.

It's Google's mission to provide its users with the best possible information related to the search query it has been asked by a user, right?

So how does Google do that? How does it sift through the BILLIONS of pages on the 'net to serve up the perfect answer to your question?

Now, I've come to learn the average person really doesn't give much thought as to how this works. But, personally, as an SEO this is a question I have to ask myself everyday.

So Josh, how does Google work?

Relevance

Well it is not an easy question to answer! But, to answer it simply Google has a mathematical equation (an algorithm) that works out which website is most relevant to a search query.

Google employs a robot which crawls the Internet gathering and downloading information about every website in existence. It adds this information to the "Google Index", which is then called upon every time a search is made.

The information that is best matched to a users query is then presented in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in order of relevance.

Authority

To complicate things a little, another "spice" is added to the search mix, this hypothetical spice being 'authority'. Instead of relying just on the information present on a website and the relevance the content has to a search result (many webpages can be of equal relevance to a search query) authority and reputation also play a part in determining which webpages appear in the SERPs.

If a brand's domain (website) has high authority and a good reputation in its industry it will rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) compared to a webpage of similar relevance.

Reputation and authority are built upon the number of external websites that link to a website. As Hubspot's Marketing Grader tool explains so beautifully each external website that links to yours is in essence a vote in the giant popularity contest that is the internet. The more links you have, the more authority and reputation your website has in Google's eyes.

Links

Now, to up the notch of complication a little bit further let's add a couple of other ingredients to our search engine recipe; firstly, not all links are born equal.

Each link has its own unique value, which is based on the linking domains own authority, relevance and reputation. These three principles make up Johnson and McGee's (2009) Search Engine Tripod of Love - I would recommend this great book to any small companies looking to do SEO themselves.

Having a link from an authoritative website that is related to your industry, for example a link from the BBC website to your news story website will be extremely powerful in boosting the reputation and authority of your domain.

Having 20 links from obscure, random, spammy websites won't provide half as much link value. Therefore, it is important to build links from as many high authority, relevant websites as possible.

Anchor Text

The next factor that Google considers when ranking webpages in its results is 'anchor text'.

Anchor text can be defined as the linking text between two websites, for example you will often see the phrases 'click here', 'read more' and 'next' linking two pages together. Google considers the anchor text that links the sites together to have some relation to what the linking page is about. Therefore anchor text should always be informative and include keywords or phrases that relate to the linking page.

A lot of webmasters miss this trick! The more websites that link to you with specific anchor text, the more relevant your website will be for that specific keyword/phrase.

On-page SEO

Moreover, Google's algorithm looks at several 'on-page' signals to help rank the relevance of an individual page to a search query.

These include what text has been used in the; heading tag, title tag, file names, image alt text, keyword density and URL structure to name a few. To learn more about how to optimise these aspects of your website head on over to Moz's On-Page Ranking Factors resource or check out beginners On-Page SEO guide.

Summary

The top tips to take from this article are;

Google has a robot that crawls the web, adding information about every webpage to the Google Index.

Every time a search is made the Google Index is checked and the most relevant and authoritative webpages are presented to the user.

To increase the authority of your website you need to have several links from authoritative domains related to your industry (just how many will be discussed in a future blog post).

To increase the relevance of your webpages informative anchor text should be used to link to your website from other domains. This is also true when linking in between pages on your own website.

To increase the relevance of your webpages further all on-page SEO best practices must be implemented.

I hope you have found this blog post to be of use, at Improve My Search Ranking.com we hope to provide the best value possible. If you have any ideas for a further blog post please do let us know in the comments below.

Have a great day!

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How Does Google's Search Engine Work? | Improve My Search Ranking

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Today we discuss a mighty secret, one nobody at Google HQ wants you to know about. Yes, we're going to explain to you exactly how Google works. It's Google's mission to provide its users with the best possible information related to the search query it has been asked by a user, right?

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This article was published just recently in the Telegraph. It explains how the Google algorithms have been known to be updated up to 600 times per year. Sources at Google claim that its index holds hundreds of billions of web pages and is more than 100,000,000gb in size, so there’s plenty to read through. I learned that Google updates their algorithm a lot and google provides plenty of search results.

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Google makes light work of returning more web pages than you can shake a stick at in the blink of an eye. The search engine uses a series of algorithms - the exact ins and outs of which remain a close-guarded mystery, with Google only ever revealing minor details and cryptic tips - to sort through the billions of pages in its index. These algorithms have been known to be updated up to 600 times per year. In short, they analyse user queries in order to give you the most fitting web pages.

Crawling the web

Before you even think about searching for something, Google is already at work, collecting data from the internet using web crawler software, also known as spiders. The spiders follow links across the web to discover pages and bank information in Google's enormous and constantly updating index. Sources at Google claim that its index holds hundreds of billions of web pages and is more than 100,000,000gb in size, so there's plenty to read through.

The bigger and more popular a site is, the more often the spiders will visit to capture new information. Webmasters - those in charge of a website - can ask Google's spiders to leave their pages out of the index, and also request to be crawled more frequently, but ultimately this is Google's decision and no amount of money will sway its stance on crawl frequency. Google has said: "We provide the same tools to all websites to ensure the best possible results for our users".

If you ever encounter a website owner who requests Google doesn't crawl their pages, keep in mind that a Google search is actually a search of its index - not a search of the entire web - so the only way to be discovered would be via an alternative search engine.

Credit: Getty

Understanding your needs

When you type your query, Google will identify and analyse the words used to work out what your search means. Using advanced tools that help understand natural language - including its synonym system, which tackles words with multiple meanings - as well as correcting spelling errors, Google categorises your search by looking for triggers such as "review", "opening hours", "yesterday" and more. It then searches its index to offer up the best pages.

Refining your search for you

Spelling corrections are part of what makes Google an awesome tool and further highlight its desire for high-quality results. In the past, a misspelt query would return a series of misspelt results, with an option to click on the "Did you mean..." text to re-run the search using the correct spelling. More recently, Google has decided the best thing for the user is to implement an interface that it calls Full Page Replacement, which adjusts your spelling for what it believes is correct and shows a correctly spelt series of results. On the off chance that Google is wrong, there's always the "Search instead for..." text for you to click.

Due to the number of pages that are uploaded to the web every second of every day, you might spot changes in your search results within a short amount of time. That's because Google doesn't sleep - it's constantly looking to add new content to its index by recrawling. Live events and breaking news stories will see results pages change fairly rapidly, whereas long-standing information, such as that about historical figures (who aren't often collecting online attention) will be far more stable.

Google says that it handles "trillions of searches each year" and that 15 per cent of all queries are new. That's a heck of a lot of information to process, which is why the search engine has to think up different ways of showcasing data and satisfying users. One of the biggest implementations came in 2012 with the introduction of the Knowledge Graph (the information box you'll see on the right-hand side following a relevant desktop Google search, such as " What is the Statue of Liberty? ") .

The need to evolve

The Knowledge Graph is a huge database of people, places and things that aims to satisfy queries and encourage users to discover more through suggested connections and related areas.

In 2015, Google thought of another way to help users when it introduced its People Also Ask boxes, which were made dynamic two years later. Ask a relevant question - such as "Can you eat cheese when pregnant? " - and you'll see a neat little collection of additional questions that may well prove relevant. The addition of the dynamic feature means that you can lose yourself in a bit of a Google rabbit hole, watching the People Also Ask questions change and become more relevant the more you click on them.

With more web activity moving to mobile and the adoption of intelligent personal assistants, such as Google Home and Amazon Echo, the biggest search engine in the world is sure to continue its evolution and advancing intelligence for years to come.

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Google makes light work of returning more web pages than you can shake a stick at in the blink of an eye. The search engine uses a series of algorithms - the exact ins and outs of which remain a close-guarded mystery, with Google only ever revealing minor details and cryptic tips - to sort through the billions of pages in its index.

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This article explains that Google uses a special algorithm just like any other search engine. Google also uses spiders or crawlers, an automated program to generate search results. Google uses a trademarked algorithm called PageRank, which gives each Web page a relevancy score. From this, I learned that in order to be recognized by the Google search engine, you must be assigned a relevancy score.

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Google's search engine is a powerful tool. Without search engines like Google, it would be practically impossible to find the information you need when you browse the Web. Like all search engines, Google uses a special algorithm to generate search results. While Google shares general facts about its algorithm, the specifics are a company secret. This helps Google remain competitive with other search engines on the Web and reduces the chance of someone finding out how to abuse the system.

Google uses automated programs called spiders or crawlers, just like most search engines. Also like other search engines, Google has a large index of keywords and where those words can be found. What sets Google apart is how it ranks search results, which in turn determines the order Google displays results on its search engine results page (SERP). Google uses a trademarked algorithm called PageRank, which assigns each Web page a relevancy score.

A Web page's PageRank depends on a few factors:

The frequency and location of keywords within the Web page: If the keyword only appears once within the body of a page, it will receive a low score for that keyword.

How long the Web page has existed: People create new Web pages every day, and not all of them stick around for long. Google places more value on pages with an established history.

The number of other Web pages that link to the page in question: Google looks at how many Web pages link to a particular site to determine its relevance.

Out of these three factors, the third is the most important. It's easier to understand it with an example. Let's look at a search for the terms " Planet Earth."

As more Web pages link to Discovery's Planet Earth page, the Discovery page's rank increases. When Discovery's page ranks higher than other pages, it shows up at the top of the Google search results page.

Because Google looks at links to a Web page as a vote, it's not easy to cheat the system. The best way to make sure your Web page is high up on Google's search results is to provide great content so that people will link back to your page. The more links your page gets, the higher its PageRank score will be. If you attract the attention of sites with a high PageRank score, your score will grow faster.

Google initiated an experiment with its search engine in 2008. For the first time, Google is allowing a group of beta testers to change the ranking order of search results. In this experiment, beta testers can promote or demote search results and tailor their search experience so that it's more personally relevant. Google executives say there's no guarantee that the company will ever implement this feature into the search engine globally.

Google offers many different kinds of services in addition to chat. In the next section, we'll see how some of them work.

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­Google's search engine is a powerful tool. Without search engines like Google, it would be practically impossible to find the information you need when you browse the Web. Like all search engines, Google uses a special algorithm to generate search results. While Google shares general facts about its algorithm, the specifics are a company secret.

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This article from Quora shows what sets Google apart is how it ranks search results, which in turn determines the order Google displays results on its search engine results page (SERP). Google uses a trademarked algorithm called PageRank, which assigns each Web page a relevancy score. This article explained that PageRank is a relevancy score, which lets it be one of the tops search results.

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Answer (1 of 81): Google's search engine is a powerful tool. Without search engines like Google, it would be practically impossible to find the information you need when you browse the Web. Like all search engines, Google uses a special algorithm to generate search results. While Google shares ge...

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This blog post from Neil Patel shows and explains how Google processes over two trillion searches in a single year. That’s up from only one billion a year in 1999. It’s gotten really good at shuttling information back-and-forth across its "pipeline," which connects users to its database of information.

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Google's search engine is technically complex.

There are hundreds (some say thousands) of different factors taken into account so that the search engine can figure out what should go where.

It's like a mysterious black box, and very few people know exactly what's inside.

However, the good news is that search engines are actually pretty easy to understand.

We may not know every single factor (out of a hundred or thousand), but we also don't need to.

I'll bring it down to the basics with a simple method to please Google, rank higher, and bring in more website traffic.

I'm also going to introduce you to some of the latest developments, like RankBrain, that help Google guess what you're actually looking for (even if you don't type it in).

But first, I'm going to walk you through exactly how Google's search engine really works so that you can see that it's not as difficult to understand as you might think.

How do search engines crawl the web?

Google's first job is to 'crawl' the web with 'spiders.'

These are little-automated programs or bots that scour the 'net for any and all new information.

The spiders will take notes on your website, from the titles you use to the text on each page to learn more about who you are, what you do, and who might be interested in finding you.

That may sound simplistic on the face of it.

But that's no small feat considering that there are anywhere from 300-500 new web pages created every single minute of the day.

So the first massive challenge is to locate new data, record what it's about, and then store that information (with some accuracy) in a database.

Google's next job is to figure out how to best match and display the information in its database when someone types in a search query. Scaling becomes a problem again, though.

Google now processes over two trillion searches in a single year. That's up from only one billion a year in 1999.

That's roughly a 199,900% volume increase in the last seventeen years!

So the information in its database needs to be categorized correctly, rearranged, and displayed in less than a second after someone expects it.

And time is of the essence here. Speed wins, according to Marissa Mayer back when she worked for Google over a decade ago.

She reported that when they were able to speed up the time it took the Google Maps home page to load (by cutting down on its size), traffic leaped 10% within seven days and 25% just a few weeks later.

Google won the search engine race, then, because it's able to:

1. Find and record more information

2. Deliver more accurate results

3. And do both of those two tasks faster than any other engine

It's gotten incredibly good at shuttling information back-and-forth across its "" which connects users to its database of information.

One of the reasons Google jumped out to an early head start on all of this stuff came down to the accuracy of its results.

The information it displayed was simply a lot better.

Think about it this way.

When you type something into Google, you're expecting something. It might be a simple answer, like the weather in your city, or maybe a little more complex, like "how does Google's search engine really work?"

Google's results, compared to other alternatives at the time, answered those queries better. The information was the best of the best.

And this breakthrough came from an initial theory Google's co-founders actually worked on in college.

Why do links matter?

Google's co-founders were still back in Stanford in 1998 when they released a paper entitled "The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web."

Check it out - you can even read the whole thing right here!

The PageRank breakthrough was simple.

Academic papers were often 'ranked' by the number of citations a paper received. The more they received, the more authoritative they were considered on that topic.

Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wanted to apply the same 'grading' system to the web's information. They used backlinks as a proxy for votes. The more links a page received, the more authoritative it was perceived on that particular topic.

Of course, they didn't just look at the number of links. They also factored in quality by considering who was doing the linking.

If you received two links, for example, from two different websites, the one with the more 'authority' on a topic would be worth more.

They also considered relevance to better gauge the 'quality' of a link.

For example, if your website talks about "dog food," links from other pages or sites that talk about things related to "dogs" or "dog food" would be worth more than one talking about "truck tires."

Now, before we go any further, please understand that we're talking about concepts that are over a decade old.

PageRank may have mattered years ago, but it's evolved tremendously since then. So don't worry about it explicitly today.

One of the reasons is because of new algorithm developments like RankBrain.

What is 'RankBrain' and how does it work?

RankBrain was first acknowledged only a few years ago by Google engineer Greg Corrado:

RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query.

Google's been working on this technology for the past five years to help the search engine handle the massive increases in volume without losing accuracy.

The RankBrain secret sauce is that it uses artificial intelligence to continually learn how to improve.

So the more it processes new information or new search queries for users, it actually gets better and more accurate at returning this information.

For example, Google's algorithm "might have up to 10,000 variations or sub-signals," according to Search Engine Land. That's a lot!

As you can imagine, somehow managing all of those on the fly would be incredibly difficult (if not impossible).

That's where RankBrain comes in to help manage the workload.

Generally, the two most important ranking factors are:

1. Links (and citations)

2. Words (content and queries)

RankBrain helps to analyze or understand the connections between those things so Google can understand the context behind what someone's asking.

For example, let's say you type in the word "engineer salaries."

Now think about that for a moment. What type of engineer salaries are you looking for?

It could be "civil," "electrical," "mechanical," or even "software."

That's why Google needs to use several different factors to figure out exactly what you're asking for.

But let's say the following events played out over the past few years:

You're getting a degree in computer science.

Your IP address puts on the campus of Stanford University.

You follow tech journalists on Twitter.

You read TechCrunch almost every single day.

And you were just Googling "software engineer jobs" last week.

See?

Google's able to piece all of these random bits of data together. It's like a bunch of puzzle pieces suddenly coming together.

So now Google knows what type of "engineer salaries" to show you, even though you never explicitly asked for "software engineer salaries."

That's also how Google is now answering your questions before you even ask them.

For example, do a generic search right now for anything, like "pizza."

Now, what do you see?

You see the typical ad spaces up at the top.

However, the local results below the ads are assuming that you're asking "where to get pizza."

The Knowledge Graph on the far right-hand side is serving up almost every fact and figure about pizza imaginable.

RankBrain can process and filter all of this data to give you answers before you even ask them.

Change your search up a little (like this one for "pizza hut") and the search engine result page (SERP) changes with new information.

Now you know how Google's search engine really works.

While you don't need to be an expert, understanding the basics like this can help you better figure out how to give your prospects exactly what they want (so you get better rankings and more traffic).

Here are a few of the big things to keep an eye on.

How to rank higher: Solve people's problems

People type search strings into Google to get an answer to whatever question they're facing.

If they're looking for an answer, it means they have a question.

And if they have a question, it means they have a problem.

So your primary job is to solve someone's problem.

In theory, it's really that simple. If you solve someone's problem better than anyone else, you'll get better rankings and more traffic.

Let's take a look at a few examples so you can see exactly how this works in real life.

Someone comes home from a long day at work. All they're looking forward to doing is grabbing something to eat fast and hanging out with their family or watching a new show on Netflix.

But before they're able to throw a meal together, they try to run the kitchen sink and discover that it's clogged.

Bummer.

It's already getting late, though, so they don't want to call a plumber. Instead, they head over to Google and start typing in "how to unclog drain" as their search query.

Then here's what they see:

See?!

Way up at the top is an ad for a plumber (just in case you want to call in a professional).

Next up is an Instant Answer box that contains step-by-step instructions that Google believes has helped other people. So you might already be able to fix your sink without ever leaving this page!

Otherwise, below that are related questions that other people commonly ask (along with their answers).

So all of this begs the question: How do you create something that can help solve a user's problem?

I'll answer that in one second, but here's what you don't do for the record:

"Keyword density" used to be an old-school tactic that was once relevant when Google's algorithm was dumb and static. But today, with RankBrain, Google has become a borderline genius.

So keyword stuffing like it's 1999 all over again can only hurt you in the long run. And as you can see, this is a terrible "answer" or "solution" to someone's problem.

After saying that, there are a few places on a page that you want to pay special attention to.

For example, the Title Tag and Meta Description are used by Google to provide an official answer for what this page is about.

Those are the two elements that will also show up on a SERP when someone types in their query.

It only makes sense, then, that you should use the main topic in those areas so that everyone knows exactly what your page is discussing.

Do you want to see where that text is getting pulled from?

Simply right-click on a website to view the source code. For example, my homepage looks something like this:

You can see the title tag and meta description at the top of the code.

I'm also using Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin to help add these extra fields on the backside of WordPress.

That way, all you have to do is write out the specific title and description in plain text (as opposed to getting your hands dirty with code).

Otherwise, the actual page content should be written for humans (as opposed to keyword stuffing to tricks or fool the search engines).

Instead, here's how your page content should look:

In that example, I was writing an in-depth response to help someone figure out a solution to a complex problem (keyword research).

But even though it's a complex subject, I was trying to give them a simple, step-by-step solution so they could fix that problem ASAP.

Google even takes website usage data into account now to determine how helpful your content is.

For example, let's say that someone clicks on your website from Google and is turned off by the poor design or hard-to-read content. So they 'bounce back' to Google immediately to find a different result.

That's a bad sign! Google's now able to pick up on that and determine that you weren't a happy searcher. So maybe Google will try to find a few other results to swap out with that one to hopefully make everyone happy.

That's why I also break up the paragraphs and include a lot of images. The goal is to help people quickly find what they're looking for. I want them to read the page faster and digest the information more easily so that they'll stick around longer instead of bouncing away.

That's the key to ranking well in search engines. Give the people what they want, keep them around or coming back for more, and Google will be happier as a result.

Let's go back to our clogged drain example to see how this works in another context.

Those are all pretty good results!

In each case, the person who crafted each page provided a detailed answer to a common problem.

Let's zero in on that second SERP result, "7 Brilliant Ways to Unclog a Drain (Photos)" from Yahoo, to discover what they're doing so well to hit number two on a big, popular search query like that.

This seems like it might be a good result because it gives us multiple methods to try, along with photos so we can see exactly what's happening.

Let's click on that to see what they provide.

Pretty good overall!

It provides the user with good, quality content to help solve a problem. The better your content does that, the more links or 'upvotes' it will receive when other people find it useful, too.

Links and other citations or social signals help alert Google. They tell the search engine that your page is on the rise and to start paying attention to your website for these topics.

Your page will get better treatment, move up in the rankings, be exposed to more people, get more links or votes as a result, and continue that upward trend.

That's where the genius of Google's process comes into play.

It makes people happy by giving them exactly what they're looking for. And when you do it right, it gives you compounding benefits that can take off all of a sudden, expanding your website traffic as a result.

Conclusion

Google's search engine is one of the most complex technologies in the world.

It crunches a mind-numbing amount of data at lightning speeds to give people exactly what they're looking for and when they want it.

There's a good reason why Google's advertising business pulls in 78% of all search ad revenues.

But when you boil everything down to the basics, search engines are actually pretty easy to understand.

They're just trying to help people find what they're looking for.

People use Google to find answers and solution. They have something on the top of their minds, and they want to find an answer that helps them clear the issue to move on with their day.

Google does that better than anyone else by pulling data from all sorts of places to determine exactly what you, specifically, are looking for - even if you don't type it in that way!
What do you think of Google pulling in data to better answer your questions: Creepy or helpful?

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How Google's Search Engine Really Works (A Peek Under The Hood)

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Google's search engine is technically complex. There are hundreds (some say thousands) of different factors taken into account so that the search engine can figure out what should go where. It's like a mysterious black box, and very few people know exactly what's inside.

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This article from BBC has pictures and explains how The company uses 0.01% of the world's electricity supply running one of the world's most extensive computer networks, combining well over one million servers. There are at least 200 different variables, which Google weighs up every time we search. The exact details of Google's ranking algorithm are secret, but it includes several core components.

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When you Google something, you're not actually searching the web. You're searching Google's index of the web. Click on the icon labels to discover how Google finds and indexes all that content and returns it to your computer.

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Google's search engine is so ubiquitous in the UK it's become a verb. But how does the search engine so many of use every single day actually work?