Introduction to how

Google works.

Chapter one How Google Works 1

 Introduction
• In its infancy, the Internet wasn’t what you think of when you use it
now. In fact, it was nothing like the web of interconnected sites that
has become one of the greatest business facilitators of our time.
• To find a specific file in that collection, users had to navigate through
each file. Sure, there were shortcuts. If you knew the right people —
that would be the people who knew the exact address of the file you
were looking for — you could go straight to the file. That’s assuming
you knew exactly what you were looking for.

Chapter one How Google Works 2

 History of Search Engines
• The whole process made finding
files on the Internet a difficult,
time-consuming exercise in
patience; but that was before a
student at McGill University in
Montreal decided there had to
be an easier way.

Chapter one How Google Works 3

 History of Search Engines
• Archie (http://archie.icm.edu.pl/archie-adv_eng.html) wasn’t actually a
search engine like those that you use today, but at the time it was a
program many Internet users were happy to have. The program
basically downloaded directory listings for all the files that were stored
on anonymous FTP sites in a given network of computers.
• Archie helped solve this data scatter problem by combining a script-
based data gatherer with a regular expression matcher for retrieving file
names matching a user query.
• However, Archie’s search capabilities weren’t as fancy as the natural
language capabilities you find in most common search engines today,
but at the time it got the job done
Chapter one How Google Works 4
 History of Search Engines
• In 1991, however, another student named Mark McCahill, at the
University of Minnesota, realized that if you could search for files on
the Internet, then surely you could also search plain text for specific
references in the files. Because no such application existed, he
created Gopher, a program that indexed the plain-text documents
that later became the first web sites on the public Internet.

Chapter one How Google Works 5

 First Search Engines
• The first real search engine, in the form that • Excite—1993
we know search engines today, didn’t come • Yahoo!—1994
into being until 1993. Developed by Matthew • Web Crawler —1994
Gray, it was called Wandex. • Lycos —1994
• Wandex was the first program to both index • Infoseek— 1995
and search the index of pages on the Web. • AltaVista — 1995
This technology was the first program to
crawl the Web, and later became the basis for • Inktomi—1996
all search crawlers. After that, search engines • Ask Jeeves — 1997
took on a life of their own. From 1993 to • Google —1997
1998, the major search engines that you’re • MSN Search—1998
probably familiar with today were created: • Bing — 2009
Chapter one How Google Works 6
 Be Aware!!!!
• There are thousands of bloggers and journalists spreading volumes of
information that simply isn't true. If you followed all the advice about
SEO written on blogs, it's unlikely you would receive top listings in
Google, and there’s a risk you could damage your site performance
and make it difficult to rank at all.

Chapter one How Google Works 7

 Exercise
• Go to google.com
• Type : how to pass in exam
• After you did this focus on the results
• How many websites did google find
• How long does it take to find the results .
• Why some websites appeared on Google’s top page while others
appeared on page number 10.

Chapter one How Google Works 8

Anatomy of a Search Engine
• Search engine is a piece of software that uses algorithms to find and collect
information about web pages. The information collected is usually
keywords or phrases that are possible indicators of what is contained on
the web page as a whole, the URL of the page, the code that makes up the
page, and links into and out of the page. That information is then indexed
and stored in a database.
• On the front end, the software has a user interface where users enter a
search term — a word or phrase — in an attempt to find specific
information. When the user clicks a search button, an algorithm then
examines the information stored in the back-end database and retrieves
links to web pages that appear to match the search term the user entered.

Chapter one How Google Works 9

 Anatomy of a Search Engine
1. Query interface
• The query interface is what most
people are familiar with, and it’s
probably what comes to mind
when you hear the term ‘‘search
engine.’’ The query interface is
the page, or user interface, that
users see when they navigate to
a search engine to enter a search
term.
• How about Yahoo (portal)

Chapter one How Google Works 10

 Anatomy of a Search Engine
2.Search engine results pages
• The other sides of the query interface, and the only other parts of a
search engine that’s visible to users, are the search engine results
pages (SERPs). This is the collection of pages that are returned with
search results after a user enters a search term or phrase and clicks
the Search button. This is also where you ultimately want to end up;
and the higher you are in the search results, the more traffic you can
expect to generate from search. Specifically, your goal is to end up on
the first page of results — in the top 10 or 20 results that are returned
for a given search term or phrase.

Chapter one How Google Works 11

 Anatomy of a Search Engine
2.Search engine results pages
• Based on previous exercise, What’s the first thing you do when the
page appears?
• There is no magic bullet or formula that will garner you those rankings
every time. Instead, it takes hard work and consistent effort to push
your site as high as possible in SERPs. At the risk of sounding
repetitive, that’s the information you’ll find moving forward. There’s a
lot of it, though, and to truly understand how to land good placement
in SERPs, you really need to understand how search engines work.
There is much more to them than what users see.

Chapter one How Google Works 12

 Anatomy of a Search Engine
3.Crawlers, spiders, and robots
• The query interface and search results pages truly are the only parts
of a search engine that the user ever sees.(Front end)
• In fact, what’s in the back end is the most important part of the
search engine, and it’s what determines how you show up in the front
end.
• Spiders, crawlers, and robots are programs that literally crawl around
the Web, cataloguing data so that it can be searched. In the most
basic sense, all three programs — crawlers, spiders, and robots — are
essentially the same. They all collect information about each and
every web URL.

Chapter one How Google Works 13

 Anatomy of a Search Engine
3.Crawlers,spiders, and robots
• As discussed in the previous slide that back end of search engine consist of 3
main parts. Search engine spiders follow links on the web to request pages
that are either not yet indexed or have been updated since they were last
indexed. These pages are crawled and are added to the search engine index
(also known as the catalogue). When you search using a major search engine
you are not actually searching the web, but are searching a slightly outdated
index of content which roughly represents the content of the web. The third
part of a search engine is Robots which Perform spider and crawlers Actions.
• In other words , the robot is able to find the site when the end user type a
word or phrase. This step is called query processor.
• For more details please watch this video
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVV_93mBfSU
Chapter one How Google Works 14
 Anatomy of a Search Engine
4. Databases
• Every search engine contains or is connected to a system of databases where data about
each URL on the Web (collected by crawlers, spiders, or robots) is stored. These databases
are massive storage areas that contain multiple data points about each URL.
• The data might be arranged in any number of different ways and is ranked according to a
method of ranking and retrieval that is usually proprietary to the company that owns the
search engine.
• You’ve probably heard of the method of ranking called PageRank (for Google) or even the
more generic term quality scoring.
• This ranking or scoring determination is one of the most complex and secretive parts of
SEO. Why?
• Answer : because search engine companies change the weight of the elements used to
arrive at the score according to usage patterns on the Web.
• The idea is to score pages based on the quality that site visitors derive from the page, not
on only how well web site designers can
Chapter manipulate
one How Google Works the elements that make up the quality
15
 4.Databases
Cached web pages on Google
• Cached pages on Google and what they mean to you. Search results
on Google often come with a “Cached” page version that can be
accessed by clicking the green arrow next to the URL. Clicking
“Cached,” will take you to the version of the page that Google saw
when it last visited the site and indexed its content.

Chapter one How Google Works 16

Anatomy of a Search Engine

Chapter one How Google Works 17

Recent Google updates and how
to survive them.
• Keywords are still vitally important in web page ranking. However, they’re
just one of dozens of elements that are taken into consideration ,BUT
Keywords still the most important elements of SEO.
• Simply put, everybody wants to be in Google. Google is fighting to keep
its search engine relevant and must constantly evolve to continue
delivering relevant results to users.
• This hasn't been without its challenges. Just like keyword stuffing,
webmasters eventually clued onto another way of gaming the system by
having the most 'anchor text' pointing to the page. If you are not familiar
with this term, anchor text is the text contained in external links pointing
to a page.
Chapter one How Google Works 18
Anchor text example

Chapter one How Google Works 19

Recent Google updates and how
to survive them.
• Anchor text created another loophole exploited by spammers. In many
cases, well meaning marketers and business owners used this tactic to
achieve high rankings in the search results.
• Along came a new Google update in 2012, this time called 'Penguin'.
Google’s Penguin update punished sites with suspicious amounts of links
with exact matched anchor text pointing to a page, by completely
delisting sites from the search results.
• Many businesses that relied on search engine traffic lost all of their sales
literally overnight, just because Google believed sites with hundreds of
links containing just one phrase didn't acquire those links naturally

Chapter one How Google Works 20

How to recover from Google
changes, or
to prevent being penalized by new
updates
• There are many techniques you should consider it to increase your
website rank on SE. Google says :
1. If you want to stay at the top of Google, never rely on one tactic.
2. Always ensure your search engine strategies rely on SEO best
practices.

Chapter one How Google Works 21

Authority, trust & relevance. Three
powerful SEO strategies explained.
• Today, Google has well over 200 factors such as
• Google assesses how many links are pointing to your site
• How trustworthy these linking sites are
• How many social mentions your brand has e.g
https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29437/20-free-social-medi
a-and-brand-monitoring-tools-that-rock.aspx

• How relevant your page is

• How old your site is
• How fast your site loads
… andChapter
theonelist goes on 
How Google Works 22
 Does this mean it's impossible or difficult to get top rankings in
Google?

• The answer is Nooooooooooooo.

• Google’s algorithm is complex, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand
how it works.
• In fact, it can be ridiculously simple if you remember just three principles. With these
three principles you can determine why one site ranks higher than another, or discover
what you have to do to push your site higher than a competitor.
• These three principles summarize what Google are focusing on in their algorithm now,
and are the most powerful strategies SEO professionals are using to their advantage to
gain rankings.
• The three key principles are:
1. Trust,
2. Authority
3. Relevance.
Chapter one How Google Works 23
 1.Trust

• Trust is at the very core of Google’s major changes and updates the
past several years. Google wants to keep poor-quality, shoddy sites
out of the search results, and keep high-quality, legit sites at the top.
• If your site has high-quality content and backlinks from reputable
sources, your site is more likely to be considered a trustworthy
source, and more likely to rank higher in the search results.

Chapter one How Google Works 24

 1.Trust
(Quality considerations)
• The difference with a quality score is that you’re measuring elements of design, rather
than actions of an individual. For example, some of the elements that are known to be
weighted to develop a quality score are as follows:
• Domain names and URLs
• Page content
• Link structure
• Usability and accessibility
• Meta tags
• Page structure
• It’s a melding of these and other factors — sometimes very carefully balanced factors —
that are used to create the quality score. Exactly how much weight is given to each factor
is known only to the mathematicians who create the algorithms that generate the quality
score, but one thing is certain: The better quality score your site generates, the better your
search engine results will be, which means the more traffic you will have coming from
search engines. Chapter one How Google Works 25
 2.Authority

• Previously the most popular SEO strategy, authority is still powerful,

but now best used in tandem with the other two principles. Authority
is your site’s overall strength in your market.
• Authority is almost a pure numbers game, for example: if your site has
one thousand social media followers and backlinks, and your
competitors only have fifty social media followers and backlinks,
you’re probably going to rank higher.

Chapter one How Google Works 26

 3. Relevance.
• Google looks at the contextual relevance of a site and rewards
relevant sites with higher rankings. This levels the playing field a bit,
and might explain why a niche site or local business can often rank
higher than a Wikipedia article.
• You can use this to your advantage by bulking out the content of your
site with relevant content, and use the SEO algorithms to give Google
a ‘nudge’ to see that your site is relevant to your market.
• You can rank higher with less links by focusing on building links from
relevant sites. Increasing relevance like this is a powerful strategy and
can lead to a high rankings in competitive areas

Chapter one How Google Works 27

 How Google ranks sites now—
Google’s top-10 ranking factors
revealed.
• Fortunately, there are a handful of industry leaders who have figured
it out, and regularly publish their findings on the Internet. With these
publications you can get a working knowledge of what factors Google
use to rank sites. These surveys are typically updated every second
year, but these factors don’t change often, so you can use them to
your advantage by knowing which areas to focus on.

Chapter one How Google Works 28

Google’s top-10 ranking factors
(2015)
1. Word count.
2. Relevant keywords on page.
3. Responsive design.
4. User signals (click-through-rate, time-on-site, bounce-rate).
5. Domain SEO visibility (how strong the domain is in terms of links and authority).
6. Site speed.
7. Referring domains (number of sites linking to your site).
8. Keyword in internal links.
9. Content readability.
10. Number of images.
Chapter one How Google Works 29
Google’s top-10 ranking factors
• If your competitors’ pages have more of the above than yours, then
it's likely they are going to rank higher. If your pages have more of the
above than competitors, then it is likely you will beat them.
• The mentioned factors are from the Search Metrics Google Ranking
Factors study released in 2015
• For more updated version regarding to new factors please visit the
link below
• http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/knowledge-base/ranking-factors/

Chapter one How Google Works 30

Google’s top-10 ranking factors
(2020)
1. A Secure and Accessible Website
2. Page Speed (Including Mobile Page Speed)
3. Mobile Friendliness
4. Domain Age, URL, and Authority
5. Optimized Content
6. Technical SEO
7. User Experience (RankBrain)
8. Links
9. Social Signals
10. Real Business Information
Chapter one How Google Works 31
1. A Secure and Accessible
Website
• Unsurprisingly, the first of SEO ranking factors has to do with having the right
kind of URL. Specifically, that’s a URL that Google’s bots can easily reach and
crawl.
• In other words, Google has to be able to visit the URL and look at the page
content to start to understand what that page is about.
• To help the bots out, you’ll need:
• A robots.txt file that tells Google where it can and can’t look for your site
information
• A sitemap, which lists all your pages. If you’re running a website, you can use
an online sitemap generator.
• HTTPS is main a factor in deciding whether or not to index a page,
Chapter one How Google Works 32
1. A Secure and Accessible
Website
• How to create a /robots.txt file and Where to put it
• The short answer: in the top-level directory of your web server.
• For example, for "http://www.example.com/shop/index.html, it will
remove the "/shop/index.html", and replace it with "/robots.txt", and
will end up with "http://www.example.com/robots.txt".

Chapter one How Google Works 33

What to put in robots.txt

• The "/robots.txt" file is a text file, with one or more records. Usually
contains a single record looking like this:
• User-agent: [Required, one or more per group] The name of a search
engine robot (web crawler software) that the rule applies to. This is
the first line for any rule. Most Google user-agent names are listed in
the Web Robots Database or in the Google list of user agents.
Supports the asterisk (*) wildcard for a path prefix, suffix, or entire
string.

Chapter one How Google Works 34

• User-agent:*
Disallow:/

Serach engines agents

Googlebot
Bingbot
Yandexbot
Slurp

Chapter one How Google Works 35

What to put in robots.txt

• # Example 1: Block only Googlebot

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
• # Example 2: Block Googlebot and Adsbot
User-agent: Googlebot
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /
• # Example 3: Block all crawlers
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Chapter one How Google Works 36
What to put in robots.txt

• Disallow: [At least one or more Disallow or Allow entries per rule] A
directory or page, relative to the root domain, that should not be
crawled by the user agent.
• Allow: [At least one or more Disallow or Allow entries per rule] A
directory or page, relative to the root domain, that should be crawled
by the user agent just mentioned.

Chapter one How Google Works 37

Another example file
in robots.txt

• A robots.txt file consists of one or more groups, each beginning with a User-agent line that specifies
the target of the groups.
• Here is a file with two group; inline comments explain each group:
• # Block googlebot from example.com/directory1/... and example.com/directory2/...
• # but allow access to directory2/subdirectory1/...
• # All other directories on the site are allowed by default.
• User-agent: googlebot
• Disallow: /directory1/
• Disallow: /directory2/
• Allow: /directory2/subdirectory1/
• # Block the entire site from anothercrawler.
• User-agent:*
• Disallow: /
Chapter one How Google Works 38
 Useful robots.txt rules
Rule Sample
Disallow crawling of the entire website. Keep in mind
User-agent: *
that in some situations URLs from the website may still
Disallow: /
be indexed, even if they haven't been crawled.
Disallow crawling of a directory and its contents by User-agent: *
following the directory name with a forward slash. Disallow: /calendar/
Calender and junk folders Disallow: /junk/
User-agent: Googlebot-news
Allow access to a single crawler named (Googlebot- Allow: /
news) User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Unnecessarybot
Allow access to all crawlers except the crawler named Disallow: /
(Unnecessarybot) User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow crawling of a single webpage named
User-agent: * Disallow: /private_file.html
(private_file.html)
Disallow google crawling of files of a specific file
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*.gif$
type (for example, .gif):

Chapter one How Google Works 39

Allow access to a single crawler named
(Googlebot-news)

• X.com
• User-agent:Googlebot-news
Allow:
User-agent:*
Disallow:/
Disallow crawling of a single webpage named (private_file.html)
User-agent:*
Disallow:/private_file.html
Disallow crawling of files of a specific file type such as pdf
User-agent:*
Disallow:/*.pdf$
Chapter one How Google Works 40
2. Page Speed (Including Mobile
Page Speed)
• Page speed has been cited as one of the main SEO ranking factors for years.
Google wants to improve users’ experience of the web, and fast-loading
web pages will definitely do that.
• Google announced a search engine algorithm update focused on mobile
page speed that will start to affect sites from July 2018. If your site doesn’t
load fast on mobile devices, then it could be penalized.
• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP gives web pages a lightning speed to
load on users mobile devices. Faster the speed, higher the rank and the
more chances that users will get to see content in less time. Apart from
improving SERP, fast loading speed will also reduce Bouncing Rate.
• Use Google’s mobile testing tool to see how your site stacks up.
Chapter one How Google Works 41
3. Mobile Friendliness
• While we’re on the subject of mobile, mobile-friendliness is another
major SEO ranking factor. More people use mobile devices than
desktops to access the web, and that’s one reason there’ve been
changes in how Google ranks search results.
• Things to look at include:
• Whether you have a responsive site that automatically resizes to fit the device
Eg. www.m.example.com
• Whether you’re using large fonts for easy readability on a small screen
• Accessibility and navigability, including making it easy to tap menus
• Ensuring that essential content isn’t hidden by ads

Chapter one How Google Works 42

4. Domain Age, URL, and
Authority
• Did you know that nearly 60% of
the sites that have a top ten
Google search ranking are three
years old or more? Data from an
Ahrefs study of two million pages
suggests that very few sites less
than a year old achieve that
ranking. So if you’ve had your site
for a while, and have optimized it
using the tips in this article, that’s
already an advantage.
Chapter one How Google Works 43
4. Domain Age, URL, and
Authority (Cont.)
• When it comes to search engine ranking factors, authority matters. As
you’ll see, that’s usually a combination of great content (see the next
tip) and off-page SEO signals like inbound links and social shares.
• You can check domain authority or page authority with
https://www.seoreviewtools.com

Chapter one How Google Works 44

5. Optimized Content
• Google’s search algorithm relies on keywords. These are the words and
phrases searchers use when they’re looking for information. They’re also
the words and phrases that describe the topics your site is about. Ideally,
those will match up.
• It’s not just about the main keywords either; it’s also important to include
terms related to the main terms people are searching for. These are
called LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords. They provide a kind of
online word association to help Google know which results to show.
• For example, using the right LSI keywords will tell Google that when
searchers type in “mini”, your page is relevant to the car, rather than the
skirt, and vice versa.
Chapter one How Google Works 45
6. Technical SEO
• We said earlier that getting the code right is one aspect of optimizing content
for better search engine rankings. Here are some of the aspects you need to
look at:
• Use keyword phrases in page titles, which is where Google first looks to
determine which content is relevant to which search. You’ll see the page title
as the first line of a search result entry.
• Use header tags to show content hierarchy. If your title is formatted as h1,
then use h2 or h3 for subheads.
• Create a meta description that both entices readers and includes your
keyword phrase. Keep meta descriptions short and grabby – you have right
around 160 characters to convince searchers that this is the post they want.
• Use keyword phrases in image alt tags to show how the images are relevant
to the main content. Google also has an image search, which is another way
for people to find your content. Chapter one How Google Works 46
7. User Experience (RankBrain)
• For a while now, Google’s been using artificial intelligence to better
rank web pages. It calls that signal RankBrain. This includes other
signals that affect your search engine ranking. These are:
• Clickthrough rate – the percentage of people who click to visit your
site after an entry comes up in search results
• Bounce rate, especially pogosticking – the number of people who
bounce away again, which basically means your site didn’t give them
what they wanted
• Dwell time – how long they stay on your site after they’ve arrived.

Chapter one How Google Works 47

8. Links

• As we said at the start, the web is built on links, so naturally, links are
a crucial SEO ranking signal. There are three kinds of links to think
about:
• Inbound links
• Outbound links
• Internal links

Chapter one How Google Works 48

9. Social Signals

• When people share your content on social networks, that’s another

sign that it’s valuable. Cognitive SEO‘s study of 23 million shares
found a definitive link between social shares and search engine
ranking.

Chapter one How Google Works 49

10. Real Business Information

• This tip is important for

businesses targeting particular
local areas. The presence or
absence of business information
is one of the most crucial local
SEO ranking factors.

Chapter one How Google Works 50

End of Chapter One

Chapter one How Google Works 51