How search engines work: They allow users to find your site by searching for specific keywords, thus allowing visitors to flow to you.
But how exactly does this process, which we always know as “the last step”, work so well?
How exactly is your site crawled, indexed, rendered, and ranked for certain keywords?
If you want to have information about SEO, if you want to strengthen your website’s rankings with strong SEO studies, you must first understand the logic of the operation of search engines.
What do search engines do?
A basic search engine performs 4 basic actions to develop a superior user experience (UX), presenting the most powerful websites to its users.
How search engines work
These can be listed as follows:
Crawling
Through this experience, they will examine your site. Bots navigating from one link on your site to another can learn about the user experience offered by a particular web page.
indexing
Then the contents, links, and more on this page are cataloged, which means they are indexed by the search engine.
rendering
The browser’s task is to read and interpret these files by parsing the relevant languages (the code languages).
High-load HTML or Javascript files require a high-load process.
Classification
To do this, they rank web pages according to the content they offer, their site speed, and other features that affect the user experience.
This ranking shows how much more visible web pages are on related keywords than their competitors and directly affects visitor traffic. The results that offer the most relevant and successful performance are displayed more in search engines.
Are search engines aware of your site?
If you want to appear on the SERP for related searches, you must first make sure that search engines can find your site. In addition to pages that need to be crawled and indexed on a website, there may be pages that you don’t want to be indexed. How will you know which pages search engines see and which they don’t? How search engines work
There is no indexing without crawling, we have that now, right? Therefore, pages that are not indexed by search engines are actually pages that have errors during crawling.
The best way to do a free trial on this subject is to type “site:domainname.com” into the search engine and then hit enter. The results you see are on every page of your website in the search engine.
If there isn’t a webpage here, that means Google (or whatever search engine you use) isn’t seeing it. In that case, it might make sense to look at the source code of this web page and see if the page has render-blocking capabilities.
How search engines work: 4 important functions
As you can see in the image above, you can also use Google Search Console to analyze which of your pages are indexed and which are not.
Possible reasons why your website is not visible in search engines
So, if a page on your site is not visible, what are the reasons for this? Hey, deep scans with tools like Screpy or Ubersuggest can help you do code optimizations, which is also called technical SEO. These tools examine the source code of each of your web pages and alert you to problems. You can examine how to fix these warnings through tasks – and if you improve them. How search engines work
Either way, if your web pages aren’t indexed, you might be experiencing one of the following issues:
- Could this page on your site be too new? If it’s new, your page may not yet be crawled, but that’s not a problem. Google bots will get there ASAP.
- If your site is not linked to any external pages, the page may be something of a ghost! Even linking your own website from your social media accounts can be a good method to improve your “visibility”.
- One type of code could be preventing search engines from crawling your site. Crawler directives often do this.
- If your site has been flagged as “spam” by Google’s bots, there’s a big problem.
What about Robot.txt files?
Not indexing any pages on your site can be caused by robot.txt files. Errors in these files break the tracing process and various problems occur. The main behavior of Google bots regarding your site’s robot.txt files is as follows:
If Google bots cannot find this file on your site, your site will continue to be crawled. If there is such a file, the site will continue to be scanned unless otherwise indicated. However, even if there is a robot.txt file, if there are problems accessing that file and errors occur, Google bots may stop crawling your site. This can cause many pages not to be indexed.
Why are crawling, rendering, and indexing important?
Indeed, the first three are of great importance in relation to the fourth. If you do the following, you can make Google crawl every page on your website and rank your website at the top if it has enough quality content.
If Google finds unnecessary code, low-quality pages, or errors with too many different codes during the process of crawling your website, it will think that the user experience you will offer is poor and that you are not a high-quality website. This situation causes Google not to take you to the desired position in the ranking even if it indexes you. So search rankings are about all that and more!
