Insight on working of Google’s search algorithm

Now that SEO is becoming a much common term in the market, every business is hoping to have their website listed higher on Google SERP. The better your rank is, better will be traffic on your website, and better will be your revenue. 

So, in order to increase this, the initial need was to understand the SEO concept, keyword research and implement it. But, in order to have the best results, one must be curious enough to know how actually a google search engine works. How does it search, sort and rank the websites, links, and pages on the search results? 

Google wants to put only the most relevant and most suitable content in front of the user, to become the most reliable source of information. Thus, to cope up with this requirement of Google, one must learn about the algorithm that works in the background during searching of any term. 

So, Google does this in many steps and have worked for many years to be the most trusted and reliable search engine. 

Let us first understand the way Google’s algorithm works:

1. Analysis of words : When you enter any word in the search box, Google tries to understand what you want to say or ask. If the search engine was a human and you would have asked him “Shoes,” his next question would have come to you as “what do you want to know about shoes, ask more?”.

This is what Google has improved in its algorithm, based on hundreds of factors, it makes an analysis whether you are looking to get shoes or you are looking for knowledge on shoes. This becomes the first step in Google’s algorithm. 

2. Matching of words : Next step that Google’s algorithm follows in the journey to return you the result, is matching the word entered by you i.e., your requirement to its labyrinth of the web available in the database. In the labyrinth, it checks which web pages are related to your query and makes out a list of most closely related items that can be presented. 

How does it match? It matches by various factors. One factor is looking the keyword in the websites, their content, keyword in the titles or webpage name or hashtags. Those fitting the category, come up on the list. This becomes the second step of Google’s algorithm.

3. Ranking pages : Once Google has prepared the list of web pages are relevant to your search query in step 2 above, now next task for the algorithm is to see which results are most trusted ones and can make the best deal for you. 

Many factors come into play here. At this point, trustworthiness and quality of your website play a major role. 

As Google says – 

“These algorithms analyze hundreds of different factors to try to surface the best information the web can offer, from the freshness of the content to the number of times your search terms appear and whether the page has a good user experience.If other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that’s a good sign the information is high quality.” 

From this point, the ball is in your court to win the race of searching. It is your task to improve the quality of your content, regularly freshen up the most relevant content on the website, improving user experience on your website, reviews, and ratings on the website, no of search results directed to your website in the past. All these factors indicate the trust level of your website. This makes Google decided whether your website is trustworthy enough to be shown in the results. 

At this point, there are many spam websites and web pages that are created by people to bypass the step, but Google’s algorithm strength usually captures and exclude the results to keep the user away from spamming. 

• Context consideration – Here, Google tries to use every information that it has related to your search query and tries to bring out the best possible results for you. As per one of the best examples explained by Google for this – If you search Barcelona and your search history says that you had earlier searched Barcelona vs. Real Madrid, the algorithm takes it as a clue to understanding that you might want to know about Barcelona football club, not Barcelona city. This way, your search query is more focused and filtered now. 

These clues are generated by factors such as your search history, your location, your country and the kind of websites you look at. 

1. Display best result – Till this point, algorithm has analyzed the words that you entered in the search box, understood your sense behind the query based on various factors, jumped and matched the query with the database and prepared generic list of related items, then filtered the items based on the quality of web pages, then considered the context based on multiple factors. This is all done behind the curtains, but now the time comes to come on the stage, ahead of curtains. At this point, algorithm re-evaluates all the information till this point and checks whether the prepared result is still perfect and most relevant for you or not? Then, it displays the result. 

So, as we see the working of Google’s algorithm, Google is the biggest player among the 3 major search engines, so it is always a good decision to modify your web pages, blogs and their content as per Google’s algorithm. To do this, it is always a better decision to go through expert companies who guide you through the process such as Vision Smash. You must ensure that the expert company you choose, must be reliable and trustworthy.

As the years are passing, Google is striving to make these searches as relevant as possible, thus releasing various versions of the algorithm. Till now, Google has launched many updates for its algorithms such as Hummingbird, Panda, Pigeon and many more.