How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking Beginner’s Guide to SEO

The only known citation of “200” is from a speech by Matt Cutts at PubCon in 2009. Google’s quality raters are instructed to look at a site’s off-site reputation. Make it easy for Google to know WHO wrote a particular piece of content. In fact, Google employs thousands of “Quality Raters” to measure how well the search results satisfy search intent. If you want to rank for a keyword, you need to use that keyword on your page. But if it regurgitates information that’s already out there, it’s probably not going to rank well.

Google Ranking Factors to Act On

This means that high search engine ranking positions help you generate organic traffic, brand awareness, and other business results. SEO rankings matter in search engine optimization (SEO) because the higher you rank for a given keyword, the more likely users are to see and click on your result. When people share your content on social networks, that’s another sign that it’s valuable. Cognitive SEO’s study of 23 million shares found a definitive link between social shares and search engine ranking. SEO ranking is a website’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords or phrases. The higher a website ranks, the more likely it is to be seen, resulting in more clicks and traffic to the website.

All those can play a role in how well a page performs in search, but the focus should be on the users who will be reading the content. The more natural backlinks you have from high-authority (trusted) websites, the better your odds are to rank higher within search results. Very early on, search engines needed help figuring out which URLs were more trustworthy than others to help them determine how to rank search results. Calculating the number of links pointing to any given site helped them do this. 4xx errors are client errors, meaning the requested URL contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled.

Evaluating Competition and Keyword Difficulty

The specter looming over most SEO-related conversations in 2025 is AI. When ChatGPT and other generative AI tools burst on the scene in late 2023, many predicted that the death of SEO was imminent. Search SEO Anomaly engines would wither away, with people turning to AI answer engines like Perplexity and Gemini to answer all their queries. Lucky for all the SEO pros out there, that prediction has not yet proved correct. Instead, nimble marketers have discovered how to employ AI to improve their SEO tactics.

• If search engines are blocked from accessing the page (for example, from Robots.txt), they won’t index the page at all.
• LLMs like Gemini and MUM are multi-modal — they can understand text, images, videos, and voice.
• Organic search results are sensitive to a searcher’s location, though seldom as pronounced as in local pack results.
• This is why a page with no inbound or internal links can be difficult to rank, as it it’s not found by Google via links in order to be crawled and indexed.
• Lots of AI-generated content on your website can lead to a ranking drop and even have your website labelled “unhelpful” by Google.

It categorizes URLs as good, poor, or in need of improvement for both mobile and desktop users. To fix any URLs that are poor or in need of improvement, click to view the report and follow the instructions. Some of the most common include excessive ads that interfere with organic content and interstitials that make it difficult for visitors to navigate the site. To check a query for local intent, Google it and check the results. If that isn’t the case for your services, it’s not a local SEO opportunity.

However, achieving and maintaining high rankings requires a comprehensive understanding of the numerous factors Google’s algorithm considers. These factors include aspects such as content quality, user experience, backlinks, and more. Pay special attention to your Google Business Profile (GBP), which is what appears in the results page when people search your business name and also where Google Maps gets its data from. Of all your online citations, GBP is considered one of the biggest local search ranking factors, especially for Google results (for obvious reasons). Add content to your GBP, such as local photos and updates, to make it clear your business is active in your location.

This indicates that your content needs to match the searcher’s intent. With All in One SEO, you can set a focus key phrase and additional key phrases, and the TruSEO on-page analysis will score how well your pages and posts are optimized. Plus, it gives you an actionable checklist you can use to make improvements.

Google checks the Core Web Vitals of a website to determine its user experience based on user interactions with the website. All things remaining the same, Google prefers to rank sites that can be easily accessed from all kinds of devices. Mobile-friendly sites are rewarded with higher rankings and sites that don’t render well on mobile devices are punished. Keyword optimization is probably the second-most important on-page SEO ranking factor after content.

Voice queries are more conversational and often longer, which means your content must reflect this shift to maintain strong SEO ranking factors. Building up backlinks—that is, getting your website linked to from a trusted, high-traffic site—bolsters your site’s standing in the eyes of consumers and search engine ranking algorithms. If someone searches “best bakery in Seattle,” businesses that have those keywords in their Google Business Profile and website are more likely to rank higher. Understanding how to assess your website’s SEO ranking is crucial for optimizing its performance.