How Google Crawls And Indexes: A Non-Technical Explanation

The algorithms and bots sound too technical for someone who is not working on SEO. Google has been trying so many things that people believe it’s not easy to understand the technicalities behind it. But, not every complex thing can be broken down to the simplest of language and practices that are easy to understand. If you want a detailed explanation, contact an SEO company. However, let’s try to make it easy for everyone to grasp the concepts of search process.

Let’s take an example of a librarian who has a list of all the books in the library and can find the desired book on-demand very quickly.

Suppose you have a new blog and you want Google to show people this blog and send traffic, in this case, you ask Google to crawl it.

It’s like registering the new website or link in the Google directory. Just like the librarian would make the entry of a new book in his registration list, Crawlers are the Google bots which keep on searching any such new link to sites or blogs. As soon as they find it, they register it in their directory. Crawlers keep on searching the web in one and many ways.

Let’s understand this with our example. The library is open to all. Anyone can put their books in the library. So, the librarian needs to keep looking for such books and get them registered as soon as possible.

Crawling (Discovering new websites) happens in the following ways:

• – Google is always reading thousands of web pages. Any new link mentioned in any new page gets scanned and registered.
• – Users also submit huge content every day through Google my business and Maps. It is a vital source of knowing new websites. Google wants to know more about you just to make sure nothing is hidden from Google. And yeah, that’s true.
• – It does take time for a human to read a book but bots can do that in a few seconds. So, google bots don’t leave any book in searching for a new website.

Indexing

Next thing comes to our table is called Indexing. Does it sound scary? No, No. It’s not. Let’s demystify it and understand with the help of our librarian. Once you have got the new book, now it’s time to understand what it is about and where it belongs. How would you do it? Obviously, you would try to read the content.

Same is done by Google. Google goes through all kinds of content present in this new link and tries to understand what it is all about.
Google is able to understand the text in best possible way rather than images and videos.

Okay, now the librarian knows about it so, what would he do next?

He will find some place to put this book along with some other books already places. Yes, now we are into the ranking thing. Where will Google rank you among your competitors and similar content sites?

It all depends on the search query. In simple terms, search query is the text you type in the Google search bar to solve your problem. Google performs so much process, scans a high quantity of data, just to ensure that relevant content is served to the query.

Let’s understand it from our librarian’s view. What if someone asks the librarian for some book? The librarian would try to find the best relevant book and then give it to the person. The same thing is to google doing for every query made in its search.

Now, that you have got an idea of what is the google crawling, indexing and the search. Let’s understand how you can work on all the parts to be in a good list of google.

To make sure that you get your website registered by Google.

• Just put your website sitemap submitted to google.
• Submit link in some pages which are already known by Google. Beware some malpractices of getting links after paying money which does not satisfy the google criteria will be marked spam.

To make sure your website is indexed properly by Google, work on the following aspects:-

• Give proper and meaningful titles.
• Use headings that reflect on what is the content
• Try to use text more than images when it comes to submitting content to google.

So, this was all about how Google crawls and indexing works. It’s about registering first and then placing it in the perfect position. And our librarian did good work to explain to you about the process. It was a non-technical explanation so you will have missed the tech terms and that scary terminology that is quite amusing.

Was something missed? Do tell me in comments about what can I add more.