Advanced: How Search Works

Understanding how Google Search crawls, indexes, and serves content is important when you're debugging issues and anticipating Search behavior on your site.

Crawling

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot visits new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.

We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process to determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, augmented by Sitemap data provided by website owners. When Googlebot visits a page it finds links on the page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

During the crawl, Google renders the page using a recent version of Chrome. As part of the rendering process, it runs any page scripts it finds. If your site uses dynamically-generated content, be sure that you follow the JavaScript SEO basics.

How does Google know which pages not to crawl?

  • Pages blocked in robots.txt won't be crawled, but still might be indexed if linked to by another page. Google can infer the content of the page by a link pointing to it, and index the page without parsing its contents.
  • Google can't crawl any pages not accessible by an anonymous user. Thus, any login or other authorization protection will prevent a page from being crawled.
  • Pages that have already been crawled and are considered duplicates of another page, are crawled less frequently.

Improve your crawling

Use these techniques to help Google discover the right pages on your site:

Indexing

Googlebot processes each page it crawls in order to understand the content of the page. This includes processing the textual content, key content tags and attributes, such as <title> tags and alt attributes, images, videos, and more. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files.

Somewhere between crawling and indexing, Google determines if a page is a duplicate or canonical of another page. If the page is considered a duplicate, it will be crawled much less frequently. Similar pages are grouped together into a document, which is a group of one or more pages that includes the canonical page (the most representative of the group) and any duplicates found (which might simply be alternate URLs to reach the same page, or might be alternate mobile or desktop versions of the same page).

Note that Google doesn't index pages with a noindex directive (header or tag). However, it must be able to see the directive; if the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, a login page, or other device, it is possible that the page might be indexed even if Google didn't visit it.

Improve your indexing

There are many techniques to improve Google's ability to understand the content of your page:

What is a "document"?

Internally, Google represents the web as an enormous set of documents. Each document represents one or more web pages. These pages are either identical or very similar, but are essentially the same content, reachable by different URLs. The different URLs in a document can lead to exactly the same page (for instance, example.com/dresses/summer/1234 and example.com?product=1234 might show the same page), or the same page with small variations intended for users on different devices (for example, example.com/mypage for desktop users and m.example.com/mypage for mobile users).

Google chooses one of the URLs in a document and defines it as the document's canonical URL. The document's canonical URL is the one that Google crawls and indexes most often; the other URLs are considered duplicates or alternates, and may occasionally be crawled, or served according to the user request. For instance, if a document's canonical URL is the mobile URL, Google will still probably serve the desktop (alternate) URL for users searching on desktop.

Most reports in Search Console attribute data to the document's canonical URL. Some tools (such as the URL Inspection tool) support testing alternate URLs, but inspecting the canonical URL provides information about the alternate URLs as well.

You can tell Google which URL you prefer to be canonical, but Google may choose a different canonical for various reasons.

Here is a summary of terms, and how they are used in Search Console:

  • Document: A collection of similar pages. Has a canonical URL, and possibly alternate URLs, if your site has duplicate pages. URLs in the document can be from the same or different organization (the root domain, for example "google" in www.google.com). Google chooses the best URL to show in Search results according to the platform (mobile/desktop), user language or location, and many other variables. Google discovers related pages on your site by organic crawling, or by site-implemented features such as redirects or <link rel=alternate/canonical> tags. Related pages on other organizations can only be marked as alternates if explicitly coded by your site (through redirects or link tags).
  • URL: The URL used to reach a given piece of content on a site.
  • Page: A given web page, reached by one or more URLs. There can be different versions of a page, depending on the user's platform (mobile, desktop, tablet, and so on).
  • Version: One variation of the page, typically categorized as "mobile", "desktop", and "AMP" (although AMP can itself have mobile and desktop versions). Each version can have a different URL (example.com vs m.example.com) or the same URL (if your site uses dynamic serving or responsive web design, the same URL can show different versions of the same page) depending on your site configuration. Language variations are not considered different versions, but different documents.
  • Canonical page or URL: The URL that Google considers as most representative of the document. Google always crawls this URL; duplicate URLs in the document are occasionally crawled as well.
  • Alternate/duplicate page or URL: The document URL that Google might occasionally crawl. Google also serves these URLs if they are appropriate to the user and request (for example, an alternate URL for desktop users will be served for desktop requests rather than a canonical mobile URL).
  • Site: Usually used as a synonym for a website (a conceptually related set of web pages), but sometimes used as a synonym for a Search Console property, although a property can actually be defined as only part of a site. A site can span subdomains (and even domains, for properly linked AMP pages).

Serving results

When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by hundreds of factors, and we always work on improving our algorithm. Google considers the user experience in choosing and ranking results, so be sure that your page loads fast and is mobile-friendly.

Improve your serving

There are many ways to improve how Google serves the content of your page:

  • If your results are aimed at users in specific locations or languages, you can tell Google your preferences.
  • Be sure that your page loads fast and is mobile-friendly.
  • Follow the Webmaster Guidelines to avoid common pitfalls and improve your site's ranking.
  • Consider implementing Search result features for your site, such as recipe cards or article cards.
  • Implement AMP for faster loading pages on mobile devices. Some AMP pages are also eligible for additional search features, such as the top stories carousel.
  • Google's algorithm is constantly being improved; rather than trying to guess the algorithm and design your page for that, work on creating good, fresh content that users want, and following our guidelines.