Google, what is it?

Today we are going to see how Google works. it is vital to know how the machine works, even if we are not going to look at everything very precisely in its tiniest cogs, but you have to have an overview of how Google works.

to understand how Google thinks to think in your turn in the same way and finally be able to do well with your website visible on Google on the keywords that will interest your prospects.

To begin with, do you know when Google was born? In what year at least. It was in 1998, September 4 to be exact. You should also know that the creators are two partners: Larry Page and Sergeï Brin. Google was acquired by its parent company, Alphabet, in 2015. That's a quick history. Now let's look at Google's success.

What is the popularity of Google due to?

Do you know why Google is so successful? Do you already know the evolution curve of the Google company? 70 billion dollars in less than 20 years. 15% growth each year. Ad spending on Google even exceeded TV ad spending in 2014. That's how financially powerful this company is.

How does Google master the web?

So that you too can take advantage of this strength of Google, I will explain how Google roams the web. It's a kind of spider that goes through a whole network from thread to thread. These networks are the spider web.

Each node in the spider's web is a web page. These nodes are the links that allow you to move from one page to another. So in fact we have a spider that weaves its web, this spider is in fact a robot, the "Googlebot", the Google robot that browses the pages of links to links.

As soon as the robot crosses a link, it will see what is happening behind this link and it opens a new page, and so on. This is why you need to have links to your site so that Google can arrive at yours and take your content into consideration.

But then, what does Google do with all these documents that it browses? It will extract the most minor information. What are the words used? What are the pictures? What are the links? When was the page created? Etc, etc…

And then they decide: should I index this page? What is the index? Google's index is the library in which it stores all the documents it has browsed and found interesting. By the way why a document could not be interesting for Google? Quite simply because it is duplicate content for example.

If you use content already present on another page, Google does not want to bother to return to a site that includes information it already knows. This is why all pages of your site must have unique content.

How do you know that a site is known to Google?

Indexing is therefore indexing a page to ensure that Google has the pages of your site in its library. To know if a page is indexed there is a request to make on the search engine, it is the request "site: your site name" and you will then see here that no document corresponds to the specified search term. This means that Google does not recognize your site.

Normal I took an example that did not exist to show you that. If ever the site exists it will give this type of result. So we see that there are eight results and then we see the listing of these different pages.

How does Google rank my site?

Google's ranking process involves evaluating numerous factors to determine the relevance and authority of a website for specific search queries. Let's walk through a simplified example of how Google might rank a site for a particular search term, such as "best hiking boots."






Step 1: Crawling and Indexing Google's web crawlers (also known as Googlebot) continuously browse the internet to discover new and updated web pages. When they find a new page or a change on an existing page, they add it to Google's index, which is a massive database of web pages.




Step 2: Keyword Analysis When a user searches for "best hiking boots," Google's algorithm analyzes the search query to understand its intent and the keywords used. It then looks for web pages in its index that contain relevant content and keywords related to "best hiking boots."




Step 3: Content Relevance Google assesses the content of indexed pages to determine if they match the search query. Pages that have the phrase "best hiking boots" in their titles, headings, and main content are more likely to be considered relevant.




Step 4: Backlinks and Authority Google evaluate the authority and trustworthiness of the websites hosting the relevant content. Sites with a strong backlink profile, especially from reputable and authoritative websites, are seen as more reliable sources of information. For instance, if several well-known outdoor gear review websites link to a specific page about hiking boots, that page may be considered more authoritative on the subject.




Step 5: User Engagement Google also considers user engagement metrics to gauge the quality of a web page. Metrics like click-through rate (CTR) from the search results, time spent on the page, and bounce rate (the percentage of users who leave the site after viewing only one page) provide insights into how users interact with the content. If users tend to click on a particular page and spend significant time on it, Google may interpret this as a positive signal that the page is valuable to users.




Step 6: Mobile-Friendliness With the increasing use of mobile devices for internet searches, Google places importance on mobile-friendliness. Websites that provide a good user experience on mobile devices are more likely to rank higher.




Step 7: Freshness of Content For queries that demand up-to-date information, like "best hiking boots in 2023," Google may prioritize pages that were recently published or updated to ensure the search results are current.



Step 8: Personalization and Location Google consider individual factors, such as a user's search history and location, to provide personalized results. If a user frequently searches for hiking gear and is located in a specific region, Google may prioritize local retailers or hiking trails in the search results.

Google is made up of many algorithms

But then how does Google decide whether this site should appear on the first page of Google and how can it influence this? So there is a straightforward mathematical formula as you can see here. So we are going to study it very precisely, we are going to have it for 1h45.

No, I'm kidding. There are indeed very important algorithms behind Google, big mathematical algorithms, but we're not going to focus on that, the goal is really for you to understand how it works without having to dismantle everything engine and study part by part.

To understand: Google has a lot of documents in its library. If you ask it a question, a query, or a keyword, like here “pm5 ergometer screen”, Google will go through all these documents to find out what we are talking about. Here we see that there are approximately fifty thousand six hundred results. It means that in google library fifty thousand six hundred documents talk about the pm5 ergometer screen.

So what is a pm5 ergometer screen?

you will tell me. It's very simple for Google because by comparing these results it will see the terms that come up most often in the documents found. And it will show us the results accordingly. Here we see that typing this keyword there gives us sales results for a concept 2 rower.

So the pm5 screen is in fact the digital screen used on concept 2 rowers and an ergometer c is a word synonymous with the rower. You already see the importance of having these keywords there in its content to be able to stand out on user requests that would not directly be the name of the product itself.

We will come back to this later to precisely optimize your content and be able to highlight especially the keywords related to the products or services that you sell.

Pages have scores

Pagerank is the algorithm developed by Larry Page in particular, we have seen that he was one of the founders of Google to precisely weigh the results of the documents found in his library according to the notoriety of these documents.

It is assumed that a document has a score. the score is 100. If this page makes two links to two different pages, half of its score will be distributed to these two pages. So one hundred divided by two gives 50, we see that there is an arrow that distributes 50 to one page and another 50 to another page.

The more links we will have from strong pages, which therefore make few links so that they send us back a lot of strength, the more our page will increase in strength. That's the simplistic version. If we take into account the reasonable surfer who is actually the one taken into account by Google, we see that each link is not equal.

There, for example, the page has a weight of 1. It makes two links, one would have thought that each of the links would have been worth 0.5 but not one is worth 0.6 and the other 0.4. This means that there are other elements to take into account that will influence the quality of a link and the weight possibly given by this link to another page. We will come back to these criteria later so that you too can have links pointing to your site that send you a lot of popularity. This is called link juice.

A simple way to find out if Google knows your site

I will now show you how to look in Google for how many pages Google knows about you and has entered into its index. We will pivot on the internet browser on an example of a site belonging to me. It's an online store. So. “website: http: slash www.deguiz-fetes.fr”. We see the number of results here 10200 results. So it may seem like a lot, but it's normal, it's an online store. We see a figure there, 0.24 seconds it is not worth giving importance to it. This is just the time Google generates results. So there are a lot of pages because it is an online store, we can do another test with my SEO consultant site. So here we see that it is a showcase site there are a lot fewer pages already, and we are at 164.

We will take an example of a site that does not exist. If you have this answer there, "no document corresponds to the specified search term", and that you did not make a mistake in the writing of your domain name, it is that there is a problem Google does not know not your site. It will therefore be impossible for you to stand out on the slightest search of the Internet user.

To sum up…

We saw today how Google works, so there is a robot that browses the different pages and goes from link to link. He then enters the documents in his library, what is called the index, and he then decides to position you, or not, on the keywords typed by Internet users. To do this, it will compare the documents to each other to find out which is the most relevant according to the keywords it will find in all its documents, and then it will weigh that with your popularity, i.e. the number of links that have a significant weight that points to your site.