How Does Google’s SEO Algorithm Work?

Richie Contartesi

Google’s SEO Algorithm In a Nutshell

Have you ever wondered just how Google SEO algorithm works? I mean, how does Google crawl through all of the websites on the Internet and index them, letting Google show you just the page you need when you search for pictures of baby otters. If you haven’t wondered this, why not? After all, understanding just how Google works is crucial to understanding how to make sure your page ranks as high as possible in search engine results. In this article, we’ll talk about how Google crawls the web and we’ll outline 5 of the most common mistakes that prevent Google from crawling your pages.

Here’s what happens:

Google uses tiny programs called “spiders” to index your sites. These programs are designed to browse the web like people browse the web, moving from page to page and from link to link. The goal of these “spiders” or “bots” is to find and index every single page on the web. What do real spiders do? They crawl, so we refer to what these programming spiders do as crawling.

Crawls can happen several times a day, or just once every 6 months. If you want to make sure Google crawls your site more often, you need to update or change your content regularly. If you’re making any of the following 5 mistakes, though, changing your content every hour won’t make a lick of difference. So, without further ado, here are the top 5 mistakes that prevent Google from crawling your pages.

5. Connectivity or DNS issues. If your servers can’t be reached by Google spiders, you won’t get indexed.

4. Incorrect URL parameters. You set the parameters in Google’s Webmaster Tools to tell Google which links not to index. Making a mistake here can result in pages from your site getting dropped from the index.

3. Badly written title or meta tags. Make sure you write your titles and meta tags properly, or you won’t get indexed. If you are using WordPress, here are some excellent SEO plugins to help you with your meta data.

2. Low pagerank. If you haven’t conducted proper search engine optimization (SEO) to improve your page rank, you won’t get crawled as often. Matt Cutts, of Google, says that “the number of pages Google crawls is roughly proportionate to your pagerank.”

1. No or incorrectly configured robots.txt or .htaccess files. These web page config files are important to get right, because they determine which pages the spiders will try to crawl or are able to access.

If you want to make sure Google can properly crawl your site, check out any crawl errors that show up in Google’s Webmaster Tools, and then correct those errors.

Be very careful with permissions and your .htaccess file, make sure your robots.txt file is set up right, and add a sitemap to your site to help the spiders know what they can expect to find. Taking care of all of these issues will ensure that your site is crawled regularly, and that all of your pages get indexed in the crawl.

Did you find our techniques helpful for you? Feel free to brag about your success or ask any additional questions in the comments. Share with someone you believe you can help too!

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