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How Search Engines Work?

From crawling to ranking — break down the invisible systems behind every search result.
Continue Your Learning Flow

Crawl

Search bots discover pages by following links across your site and beyond.

Index

Valid pages are stored in the search engine’s database for future retrieval.

Rank

Algorithms evaluate and prioritize which pages show up for relevant queries.

Crawlers:
The Web’s Quiet Explorers

Crawlers (also called spiders or bots) navigate your site by following links, reading code, and checking for instructions in your robots.txt file. If a page is blocked, unreachable, or too complex, it may never be indexed.

Search engines use crawl budgets, so your site structure directly affects what gets seen.

Indexing:
Storing What Matters

Once crawled, a page goes through validation — duplicate content is filtered, canonical tags are read, and signals are extracted (like schema). Pages with clear purpose and clean code get stored efficiently in the index.

Google doesn’t index everything. It prioritizes clean, crawlable, useful pages.

Ranking: What Shows Up (and Why)

Ranking is what determines which page appears first when you search on Google.

Search engines evaluate:

  • Content quality and query match
  • Backlinks and domain trust
  • User experience (UX), speed, mobile support
  • Structured data and freshness
Rank Signal Weight Description
Content Quality ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Relevance, structure, clarity
Backlinks ⭐⭐⭐ Authority via earned links
UX + Speed ⭐⭐⭐ Core Web Vitals, mobile usability
Schema Markup ⭐⭐ Rich results, better context

Help Search Engines Help You

You can guide bots to better crawl and index your site.

Start by:

  • Submitting your sitemap in Google Search Console
  • Using clean, semantic HTML and internal links
  • Avoiding orphan pages (pages not linked to by others)
  • Using robots.txt and noindex tags intentionally
Try Internal Linking Flow

Keep Learning

What is SEO?

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Types of SEO

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On-Page vs Off-Page SEO

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SEO Glossary

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Starter Kit

Want a ready-to-go checklist to get your site crawled and ranked?

Download the SEO Starter Kit