How does Google find my website?
Two frequent questions I get as a web designer are: How does Google find my website? and, How can I get my website listed on Google? I am hoping in the next few minutes to give a brief and concise overview of how Google can find your website.
The first and easiest answer is that Google will find your site once you submit it to them. If you go to
http://www.google.com/addurl/ there is a form where you can submit your link. This doesn’t guarantee you will be listed, but it does tell them that you exist.
The second answer is a little more complicated and is really what determines where you are ranked in the search results. Spiders! Google finds your website by utilizing a crawler, or spider. Sounds creepy, especially since we just finished up Halloween, but I assure you there are no eight legged creatures in your internet connection. These “spiders” are pieces of software that are programmed to follow every link they come to. Let me try to explain it by making up two websites for illustration purposes - site1.com and site2.com.
Google will send out a spider to site1.com for crawling. The spider will look at the coding of the web page and follow any link it comes across. So if it finds a link to an “About Me” page it will follow that link to see what is on the “About Me” page. If on that page, it comes across a link to a “Contact” page it will follow that link to see what is on the “Contact” page and so on. Let’s say that while on the “Contact” page the spider finds a link to our second website, site2.com. It will follow that link, just like it did for the links within our first site. It will repeat this process of following any link it comes to until it has “Crawled” the entire internet.
How does visiting the links help get your website listed? The spider records everything it finds during its journey across the web. Every bit of information it comes across is scanned and recorded. It is here that the magic really happens. The magicians at Google have come up with an amazing mathematical calculation that determines where to rank your site based on the content, links and coding of your site. Not only does it use the information on your website, but it looks at how many other people are linking to you and the content of your website.
So when someone types in a search term, Google is actually running a calculation to determine if your website contains the term(s). It then will look to see how many other websites link to yours. It will also calculate such things as how much of your content is the same on each page and how much of your content is relevant to the search terms. It is really a very complicated calculation, but it does it in a split second. The exact formula is kept a secret by Google, but you can find out more general information about the formula from Google at http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html.
Fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on the way you look at it), these spider’s cannot visually see the page, just the coding of it. This is where Meta tags and good content come into play, but I will deal with those in my next two posts. (I will edit this blog with links to them once they are posted).
Helpful Links:
Google Friendly Tutorial - This tutorial gives an overview of how to make a Google friendly site.
Google's Webmaster Page - This is basically Google’s webmaster help page. Has a whole lot of useful links on it.
TheSiteWizard.com - This site contains a lot of useful information on it.
Two frequent questions I get as a web designer are: How does Google find my website? and, How can I get my website listed on Google? I am hoping in the next few minutes to give a brief and concise overview of how Google can find your website.
The first and easiest answer is that Google will find your site once you submit it to them. If you go to
http://www.google.com/addurl/ there is a form where you can submit your link. This doesn’t guarantee you will be listed, but it does tell them that you exist.
The second answer is a little more complicated and is really what determines where you are ranked in the search results. Spiders! Google finds your website by utilizing a crawler, or spider. Sounds creepy, especially since we just finished up Halloween, but I assure you there are no eight legged creatures in your internet connection. These “spiders” are pieces of software that are programmed to follow every link they come to. Let me try to explain it by making up two websites for illustration purposes - site1.com and site2.com.
Google will send out a spider to site1.com for crawling. The spider will look at the coding of the web page and follow any link it comes across. So if it finds a link to an “About Me” page it will follow that link to see what is on the “About Me” page. If on that page, it comes across a link to a “Contact” page it will follow that link to see what is on the “Contact” page and so on. Let’s say that while on the “Contact” page the spider finds a link to our second website, site2.com. It will follow that link, just like it did for the links within our first site. It will repeat this process of following any link it comes to until it has “Crawled” the entire internet.
How does visiting the links help get your website listed? The spider records everything it finds during its journey across the web. Every bit of information it comes across is scanned and recorded. It is here that the magic really happens. The magicians at Google have come up with an amazing mathematical calculation that determines where to rank your site based on the content, links and coding of your site. Not only does it use the information on your website, but it looks at how many other people are linking to you and the content of your website.
So when someone types in a search term, Google is actually running a calculation to determine if your website contains the term(s). It then will look to see how many other websites link to yours. It will also calculate such things as how much of your content is the same on each page and how much of your content is relevant to the search terms. It is really a very complicated calculation, but it does it in a split second. The exact formula is kept a secret by Google, but you can find out more general information about the formula from Google at http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html.
Fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on the way you look at it), these spider’s cannot visually see the page, just the coding of it. This is where Meta tags and good content come into play, but I will deal with those in my next two posts. (I will edit this blog with links to them once they are posted).
Helpful Links:
Google Friendly Tutorial - This tutorial gives an overview of how to make a Google friendly site.
Google's Webmaster Page - This is basically Google’s webmaster help page. Has a whole lot of useful links on it.
TheSiteWizard.com - This site contains a lot of useful information on it.
1 comment:
Jason -- Gee, I wish I'd read this earlier! Thank you -- this is really helpful.
I need to get back to website stuff now...
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