– We all know Google!!
– No, we don't!
Google is known as the biggest search engine of the world. When Google started serving people to search the web for free, we all wondered what's in it for Google! And now, it owns the web! It has become a conglomerate with capitals worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
How does Google Work?
When you click on "I'm feeling lucky" or the "Google Search" button, the search engine will show thousands of results (SERPs) in a portion of a second. How's that possible? Does it scan the whole internet in less than a second? Of course not!
Google is a gigantic database of websites! All websites have a saved (cached) copy of their pages on Google's database. Somewhere... on their many servers around the world.
For that, Google crawls websites every few days, weeks or even months, based on how often you update your website.
How does Google Find my Website?
Well, Google is like a private investigator. It follows the mentions, the anchor-links or hyperlinks, it finds websites from listings or even Social Media. Google constantly keeps its database up-to-date, but in order to avoid overloading, it reduces the crawling frequency based on the activity of the sites.
How does Google Rank Websites?
Now, with all of the websites stored in its database, Google comes up with calculations by which it ranks websites and puts some websites at the top of the others and as a result, when the user searches a certain keywords, some websites will show up higher in the search results.
What criteria does Google use in ranking websites? It's unknown!
In order to keep the search experience safe and pleasant, Google avoids sharing its algorithm by which it gives websites ranking. But after several years of experience with different search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Bing, etc., SEO companies such as Niotik have made a few guesses about how Google works.
We know how Google cares about good content written in textual format in the pages, and once the pages are optimized and the content is relevant to the target keywords, the target page will come up in search results. SEO or Search Engine Optimization tends to make a site ready to be ranked highest possible (on the first page of Google) for the target keywords.
But then Google changes!!
What? Yes, it changes its algorithms, it tweaks the variables and as a result some websites that used to be on top will fall down in the search results and some new websites will appear on the top of Google results.
Why does Google change its algorithm?
There are several reasons, but the main reason why Google changes its behavior or algorithm that works with, is to give the users a better search experience. Yes, Google engineers and developers work constantly so you, the end user have a better experience, i.e, when you search something on Google, the results would be satisfactory.
Actually, it's like BMW giving out a more modern and advanced car model every few months.
But when that happens, the SEO experts will have to update their knowledge of SEO techniques so they can provide their clients with satisfactory results. That's the hardest part in this job.
Latest Google Updates
Niotik uses Moz.com as the resource for Google Updates. These heads-up's from Moz will inform the optimization experts to update their knowledge of Google and other Search Engines.
Here are the latest updates of Google as announced by Moz:
- May 2020 Core Update — May 4, 2020
- Featured Snippet De-duping — January 22, 2020
- January 2020 Core Update — January 13, 2020
- International BERT Roll-out — December 9, 2019
- BERT Update — October 22, 2019
- Penguin 4.0, Phase 2 — October 6, 2016
- Penguin 4.0, Phase 1 — September 27, 2016
- Possum — September 1, 2016
- Pirate 2.0 — October 21, 2014
- Penguin 3.0 — October 17, 2014
- Pigeon — July 24, 2014
- Panda 4.0 (#26) — May 19, 2014
- Hummingbird — August 20, 2013
- Phantom — May 9, 2013
- Knowledge Graph — May 16, 2012
- Penguin — April 24, 2012
- Panda 3.1 (#9) — November 18, 2011
- Panda 2.0 (#2) — April 11, 2011
- Panda/Farmer — February 23, 2011
The complete list of Google updates is much longer than this, but these are the major and the most important ones that you must be interested to know.
