Search engines can be confusing, and while you are on your way to understanding them and making your online presence, you might think, “How do search engines work?”
Well, that’s not something new someone’s have ever been confused about, but, not everyone understands it. When search engines were introduced all you had to do to rank your website and gain visibility was to – stuff a lot of relevant keywords – that’s it!
But as time passed, great search engines like Google, introduced new algorithms and strategies for how they’ll work, rank websites and show the results to the users.
In this blog, we’ll learn “how search engines work”, why isn’t your website ranking on search engines and some tips to get your website visibility.
How Search Engines Show Result Pages?
As a user, and as a website owner who’s looking to get their website ranked and shown on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), you might wonder how search engines choose to show which pages to keep on the SERPs.
There are crawlers present in search engines that go through millions of website pages to find information, they are called web crawlers, and in a professional way, search engine bots. They download those pages and follow the links to find new pages.
What happens is, that whenever a user enters a query in the search bar, the crawlers find information and web pages with those keywords. They accumulate all the data that are relevant and add it to the data structure, i.e., index. This process is called indexing.
But, do you know how they rank those websites? Well, the ranking happens just after indexing. To rank, search engines consider the following things on a webpage –
- Relevant keywords in the URL
- keywords in the content
- High-quality, non generic content
- New and updated page – freshness of the page
- User engagement on the website
If we go deep, there’s one goal of search engines i.e., to serve the audience with the most relevant, helpful and engaging content. Search engines provide all the web pages, and give the liberty of the user to select their preferred website source of information. This engagement also affects the website’s rank in the future, i.e., pushes it forward to rank higher.
Some other factors of user engagement that search engine considers while showing a website on SERPS, are-
- Location of the users, and the location for which the webpage is serving content
- Language of the user, and language flexibility of the website
- Previous search history of the user, and if the content is relevant to that
- The type of device the user has and if the website is optimized for it.
All these factors and processes are considered and followed by the search engines respectively to serve the audience with the best results possible.
Some Reasons That Your Website Isn’t Getting Indexed
You can be in a situation where you’re applying all the SEO strategies, keeping your content new and updated and following the norms as well. But, still, there might be chances that your website isn’t getting indexed hence, isn’t getting shown on the SERPs. Some reasons can be –
Robots.txt file disallowed
Robots. text file tells the search engines about which webpage to show, index or not. Exclusion of this can hinder your website’s visibility as the search engines wouldn’t be directed and instructed for your website.
Presence Of Noindex Meta Tag
Noindex Meta tags direct search engines to not show the webpage where it’s present. The presence of a Noindex Meta Tag might be the reason for your website not getting indexed on search engines.
No Canonical Tags
Sometimes, the copy of your webpage is created unintentionally by you or search engine bots. A Canonical Tag is kept on a webpage to tell the search engines that it is the original version.
The absence of canonical tags might confuse the search engines and search engines might rather not index your website than confuse the audience.
Leading To Error Page
Sometimes, the URLs of web pages direct the user to error pages like “Error 404”. In this situation, the search engines don’t index that webpage to maintain high-quality results and give a great experience to the audience.
All these reasons, low-quality content, lack of Off-page SEO, errors in on-page SEO, etc, can make your website not get indexed.
Wrap-up!
Even after making all the efforts and maintaining the website, if your website doesn’t appear in the search results, and isn’t getting indexed, remember one thing – millions of pages already exist, and there are thousands of new websites, web pages and content pieces created every day.
To scan them all, test their relevancy and get most of the information on the webpage, the search engine bots take time. This is a time-consuming process. So, keep patience, keep updating your website and use updated practices.
