Nobody to Somebody: How Google Decides Which Web Pages Win?

By Mitali Purkait Ghosh on May 1, 2024

Gary Illyes is a renowned analyst who works for Google’s search team and regularly updates developers, SEO experts, businesses, and other organizations about Google’s search system. He has a series on Google Search central channel on YouTube about ‘How Search Works’. Those videos are a gold mine and provide much insight into how Google handles user queries and ranks your content on their search results.

We have made an effort to condense all that knowledge and sprinkle in our expertise to create a comprehensive resource on search engine algorithms and Google’s ranking system. At Digital Concepts, our SEO experts believe in direct results for our clients, which includes trackable ranking progress. Moreover, we have flexible packages to meet diverse needs. That’s why clients often recommend us to their business partners for offshore SEO services.

Before we move on to how web pages get ranked, let’s figure out Google’s ranking objective:

Google’s ranking objective:

In his videos, Gary explains that Google wants to rank web pages that have:

• High website authority and trustworthiness
• High quality in terms of the content and the user experience
• High relevance to the user

Gary puts a lot of emphasis on user relevance and goes on to say that it isn’t mere semantic relevance. Instead, Google wants to personalize the search results depending on:

• The user’s geolocation
• Trending interests
• Search history of the user, and more.

Outsourcing SEO to India can be a strategic move to leverage this personalization aspect.

Now, let’s check out how Google ranks web pages:

1. Matching user intent

True to their goal, Google doesn’t simply match keywords at the first stage of query processing. Instead, it tries to understand the user’s intent by:

• Removing stop words like ‘and’, ‘is’, and ‘the’ that give little to no context to the search query.

• The next part of understanding user intent in search is to recognize entities within the query- objects, places, locations, people, etc. This step helps Google distinguish ambiguity. For instance, it helps the search engine figure out if the user wants to look up ‘Neverland’, the theme park, or “Neverland’, the fictional home of Peter Pan.

• Next, Google expands the query depending on the context. For instance, if you look up ‘Thanksgiving recipes’, Google may rank recipes for green bean casserole higher for someone living in the Northern States. For people living in Texas and other southern states, it may rank ‘sweet potato casserole’ higher.

2. Tapping into the Index 

Google’s web crawlers or ‘spiders’ go through webpages on the internet and regularly add them to their colossal index. Moreover, pages don’t simply get added to the collection. Instead, webpages are analyzed and categorized to match them to relevant search queries as quickly as possible.

3. Ranking the Contenders

After Google pulls out web pages from the index that may be potentially relevant to the search query, the algorithm considers several content ranking factors to order those pages. Some of them include:

• Keywords– That’s why keyword optimization still holds a lot of weight and that’s where Digital Concepts shines with our offshore digital marketing services in India.

• E-A-T principle– Content from high authority, and trustworthy websites with expert authors are prioritized.

• Freshness– Up-to-date content is very important for trending and fast-moving topics.

• Mobile-friendliness– Content that renders well on smaller screens is prioritized.

• User engagement– Google also analyzes user dwell time on web pages after they click through a result. That’s where engaging content really helps. Google also analyzes how often they click through to the site, and more such user engagement metrics to rank a page.

• Personalization– As mentioned above, Google also refers to your search history, geolocation, language preference, and other such factors to personalize the rankings. For instance, if Google knows that you’re a vegetarian from your previous search results and you look up ‘restaurants near me’, it’s highly likely that it will rank the vegetarian or vegan restaurants near you higher than other establishments.

• Custom results– With the integration of AI and deep learning, Google may generate custom results after going through several relevant pages and rank them at the top if it thinks it’s most relevant to your query.

Whether we get clients looking for online marketing agency in India, the US, or any other region, Digital Concepts always strives to improve the trustworthiness and user experience of their website. Next, we move on to create content that isn’t just fresh and relevant to target users, but also optimized with the right keywords.

That’s the secret to our success and the increasing online footprint of our happy clients. Call now at +919830140672 to rank higher on the search results or click here to know more about our services.