Once the website is ready to do online business, only then most people think about optimizing their website to rank well in the search engines. Most website owners take the help of digital marketing services to help them out with different aspects of digital marketing and deploy various strategies that will boost their rankings. However, there are certain terminologies that site owners need to be aware of, otherwise they will have trouble understanding the technical terms used by the digital marketers. These are the common terms related to Google Search Engine that need to be understood.
Crawling
Google has a software called Googlebot that goes around the web to find new and updated information from various sites. It follows previous captured links or sitemap links provided by the web masters and crawls from one page to another, to collect the data about webpages and report back to the Google server. If any new content has been added to the website in the form of article or blog, or changes have been made to the webpage, then Googlebot pays special attention to these pages. Google crawler stores the entire data about each website and when people query for something on the web, relevant data is delivered to the user based on this stored information.
Indexing
Depending on the data collected by the Googlebot crawler, indexing process takes place for certain pages of the website. If the site is not indexed by Google for any reason then the website will not be found in search results. The first step towards making the site visible in search engine results is to make sure the webpages are within the Google index. Only the pages that are indexed will appear in search results based on the rankings, when a relevant search query is typed by the user. While indexing, Google collects information such as title tags & ALT attributes and also stores data about various keywords on the webpage. When user searches for a specific keyword, Google algorithms basically goes through all the index pages for that search and displays only appropriate ones in the search results.
Algorithm updates
The search engine results are driven by the search algorithms that are programmed and implemented to identify and select the genuine websites with good credibility and display prominently for a given keyword. To offer good quality relevant content to the users, Google carries out many scans based on these algorithms, and the websites which pass these evaluations will get the eligibility to be in the search results. So far Google has made many updates to the algorithms and it is very hard to predict when a new algorithm will impact the search results.
When new updates are released, it may alter the rankings in the search results. Websites with good rankings may lose their position in search results when they are negatively affected. On the other hand, some sites may improve their rankings due to positive impact. So far, Google had released many updates for its algorithms like Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird & Possum that have greatly influenced websites rankings in the search results. The Optimization Techniques implemented by the websites to comply with one algorithm update might not work for next update. So websites need to be continuously in the process of improving their sites and their online credentials according to the algorithm adjustments.
Algorithm Refresh
People get often confused between the terms – Google update & Google refresh. A refresh of one of Google’s algorithms means Google is simply running the algorithm without any changes or modifications to the already existing calculations and logic. In case of update, Google adds, removes or modifies some of the factors and calculations to make algorithm more effective against spammy techniques. Google runs refresh to improve the quality of search results and provide a better user experience by providing results based on the most recent status of the websites. So new data is used to recalculate result position. Whenever Google algorithm refresh happens, the index gets updated and the position of the website changes in search results.
Manual Spam Actions
Google prefers to use systematic and automatic method in detecting the spam, but for certain websites it uses manual reviewing. It may tag the website as having an issue by keeping a manual check to review if the site is taking part in any spammy technique. To get precise decision before taking any action against the websites, Google assigns the issue to human review. If Google determines that the site is doing something against its guidelines, then it may demote or remove it entirely from the search results. The penalties may fall under two categories – site-wide matches and partial matches. In case of site-wide matches, the penalties apply for the complete site whereas in partial matches, it applies only to specific pages or sections of the website.