Google Crawling And Indexing: How Does Google Work?
Google Crawling And Indexing: I have used these two terms – ‘Crawling’ and ‘Indexing’ in many of my previous posts. These are two most basic terms that are related to blogging. I am sure many of you have a vague understanding of what Google Crawling and Indexing mean. But if you want to become a serious blogger, having vague knowledge about anything is not enough. You must have a proper knowledge of everything if you want to get inside the head of Google. These two terms, especially, must be understood properly because that’s where everything begins. So, let’s see what exactly Google Crawling and Indexing mean.
Google Crawling And Indexing
They say Google knows everything, that it is smart. It is so smart that it has all the information about every single website that exist on the web today, and there are millions of them.
But how does Google know about all these websites and how does it decide which particular web pages to show and in what order when we look for a particular topic?
This is where Google Crawling and Indexing comes to the picture.
What Is Google Crawling?
Crawling means to move from one point to another and this what Crawlers do.
Google Crawler, also known as Spider is, basically, a Googlebot, that moves around all over the Internet, from one page to another. And it does it through the links that are there in the pages. As it moves, it gathers information about the pages.
When the bot comes to one page of your website and gathers all information about that page, among other things, it discovers the links in that page which point to some other pages. Following the links, the Crawler moves from one page to another and gathers information. This process is called Crawling.
This is where sitemaps are important. A sitemap contains all the links in a particular website. This makes it easier for Google Crawler to move around the website and gather more information.
That being said you can let the Crawler know that you don’t want certain pages to be crawled by using robots.txt. file.
What Is Google Indexing?
Ok. So, Google Crawlers discover the pages and gather information about them. Then what?
Then the collected information are recorded in large databases. This is called Google Indexing. The word ‘Index’ as a verb means to record and this is exactly what Google Indexing means. It records the necessary information about the page which are processed by Google’s algorithm to determine the relevancy of the page to a particular query.
When a search is performed, Google fetches the relevant pages and displays it on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) in accordance with their relevancy.
You can, however, decide and tell Google not to index, i. e. record certain pages of your website using the no-index meta tag. And it is a good practice to exclude unnecessary pages from indexing. That way you are saving Google from some unnecessary tasks which, in turn, helps in building trust and authority for your website.
The big question, however, is how Google understands the content of your page and determines its relevancy.
How Does Google Understand The Relevancy Of Web Pages?
Google is, indeed, the answering machine to every query under the sun. But it is still not as smart and sophisticated as we humans are. It really doesn’t understand the content of a page, the way we humans do. Not unless you optimize the page for Google to understand. And this is where Search Engine Optimization, or SEO comes to the picture.
You have to write content in a manner that is understandable to both Google and humans. There are hundreds of parameters based on which Google determines the relevancy of your content. The more the parameters are in accordance with Google’s guidelines, the more relevant the particular web page is to Google. Based on these parameters as well as certain user behaviors, Google determines how important and useful a web page is to a particular query.
And all of these begin with Google Crawling and Indexing.
I hope you have understood everything about Google Crawling and Indexing. If you have any question, ask them in the comment section below and I will get back to you at the earliest.