How search engines work

As we already wrotepreviouslySearch engines are machines that search, analyze, and organize content to present the user with the most relevant results for their query. In order for materialswebsiteOnce your website appears in search results, search engines should see it. Therefore, the first and most important task of SEO is to make your website visible to search engines. Let's talk about how to do this.

How search engines work

Scanning– studying text, graphic, and video materials found online. The search robot finds a website page, processes it, and then follows the links on it to new pages. The found content is added to an index called Caffeine for retrieval upon user request.
Indexing– organizing and storing electronic resource materials. Search engines store information they find and deem relevant in an index – a huge database of content from which it is retrieved to answer a user's query.
Ranging– presenting content that most accurately answers the user's question. In response to the query, the search engine scans the index and returns the most appropriate, relevant material. The process of ordering materials by relevance to the query is called ranking. Typically, the most authoritative ones appear first in the search results.

How do you know if search engines see your website?

The easiest way to find out if your site's pages are indexed by Google is to use the "site:" search service.domain name"We enter in the search bar, for example, site:info.nic.ua, and see the result:

Google gives approximate results, but for a preliminary assessment this is enough.

You can see what the cached version of a website page looks like by clicking the arrow next to the URL in the search results and selecting "Cache":

For more accurate results, you can use Google Search Console (GSC). By registering for a free account, you can see if your pages are indexed.

If your site isn't visible in search results, consider the following factors:

perhaps you have a new resource that has not yet been scanned;
your site is not linked to by others
your online resource has complex navigation that makes it difficult to scan;
The HTML contains basic code that blocks search engines;
Your site is under Google sanctions.

What to do?

If you find that the pages you need are not indexed, or, conversely, unnecessary pages are indexed, you can help Googlebot find them.

Unnecessary pages may include old pages with outdated content, duplicate pages, or test pages. To hide them from Googlebot, use robots.txt. This file is placed in the root directory of the site and indicates which structural elements search engines should and shouldn't see.

You can also block pages from search engines using GSC. To do this, you need to specify which parameters should not be crawled.

You can, on the contrary, help Googlebot find the pages you need. But first, you need to understand why the robot isn't seeing them. There could be several reasons:

If access to a page is only available through a login form or questionnaire, the search engine may not see it, and the protection will work for the search engine as well;
If the text content you need to index is hosted on
To make a page more visible to search engines, other pages on the site should link to it;
Pages with errors also interfere with crawling. Addresses with errors can be found in a special section of GSC. We wrote about the most common 404 error and its causes.Here.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap can help search engines see your website's pages. It's a list of URLs of pages that need to be indexed on a particular site. It's created according to Google standards and submitted via GSC. Submitting a sitemap won't replace proper site navigation, but it will help search engines trace the path to the relevant pages.

How do links affect website ranking?

Links can be external and internal. External or backlinks come to the site from other resources. Internal links are redirects between site pages.

The number of incoming links to a website indicates its popularity and how trusted it is. It's like word of mouth, like when neighbors tell each other about a good hairdresser. Recommendations from others are a sign of good quality. But trust is also important. Do you trust the neighbor who recommends a hairdresser, or has previous experience shown that her recommendations are worthless? It's the same with links—a link from a trustworthy source.

To analyze links, Google created the PageRank algorithm. It evaluates the authority of a page based on the quality and quantity of links pointing to it. The more links from authoritative...

What role does content play?

Links are certainly important, but they would be meaningless without text. When we enter a query, we receive dozens and hundreds of responses. And the main factor determining a site's ranking in search results is the quality of its content. How interesting and informative is your content? How well does it match the user's search criteria? Does it help them achieve their goal? Text length, the number of keywords, the presence of tags in the titles, and other SEO parameters are important, but the primary focus should still be on the users who will view and read the content.

To summarize, we can say that the main factors for website ranking by search engines are:

high-quality content that meets user requests;
domain authority;
user experience;
number of external links and internal links.

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