Google's algorithm, which is based on an indefinite number of factors and rules, allows effective and relevant answers to be offered to users who type a query. Find out how it works!

Understanding what Google's algorithm is and how it works is the goal of those who want to make the most of SEO NYC . It is not an exaggeration to say that there are thousands of factors that influence Serp, although they can be summarized in a couple of hundreds of Ranking Signals , which interact with the algorithm.

What is the Google algorithm

Google's algorithm can be considered a mathematical formula developed to decode users' search intnts.

Google's self-update, which basically aims to improve the algorithm's performance, is made possible by Machine Learning , a system based on artificial intelligence that allows the search engine to learn from itself, increasing its knowledge and drawing new conclusions thanks to previously learned information.

Obviously, the most complex and consistent updates, such as the introduction of the Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird algorithms, do not depend on Machine Learning but on the work of the developers.

How the Google algorithm works

When a user searches on Google , the algorithm offers an answer after examining millions of Internet sites. This analysis is based both on signals external to the site and internal to the site: in the first case we speak of, SEO Off Site or Off Page while in the second case we speak of SEO On Site or On Page. Together they contribute to the ranking signals .

A website positioning expert, in fact, can not help but study all the updates concerning Google's algorithms, so as to develop unprecedented strategies to guarantee the sites of its customers to rank first among the results of search engines.

Crawling

The first phase of the search algorithm mechanism is represented by crawling: the spiders follow the links in the sitemap referring to the indications contained in the robots.txt file.

The search engine crawler also takes into account the links shown on all web pages: in practice it passes from one page to another following the links they contain, giving rise to a constant ramification that, starting from the website scan, arrives to scan the entire network.

Indexing and ranking

The other two phases of the mechanism of Google's search algorithm are represented by indexing - i.e. the indexing of each individual web page - and by ranking, i.e. the positioning of the website on search engines.

In the case of indexing , it is a matter of implementing an indexing process by virtue of which an index of the pages that have been scanned is created. A posting list is determined for each word: it is, in practice, the list of documents in which the word in question is contained.

With the ranking , which represents the last phase of the algorithm, Google assigns a score to the website and the pages that compose it. The higher the score, the more the website or its pages have the possibility to position themselves among the first search results and obtain more visits.

Just think that 32.5% of Internet users click on the first position of the organic results, 17.6% on the second, 11.4% on the third and so on.

The metrics

Until recently, knowing how Google's algorithm worked was much more complicated than it is now. Now, in fact, the metrics that make it up are well documented, both the On Page and the Off Page ones: the real task consists, more than anything else, in verifying the correlation between the various metrics .

In fact, the different factors that are taken into consideration by Google influence each other. The updates that are released by Google every year are in the hundreds, and this means that the relationship between the factors changes continuously.

Relevance, for example, is the result of a weighted combination of On Page factors and Off Page factors . By way of example, when the domain is considered relevant in relation to the word that has been searched for, it contributes to increasing the level of relevance for the page in question.

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