Crawl, index, rank: what Google does with your site
Search engine optimisation is not a secret recipe: it means making possible three operations that Google performs in a fixed order. First part of a series for beginners.
This text opens a series for beginners. The goal: to explain what it takes for a site to be found on Google, in what order, and why, relying on nothing but Google’s official documentation. No agency recipes, no folklore.
Let’s start at the beginning: what Google does, materially, with your site.
Three operations, in a fixed order
Google itself describes how it works in three stages, in “How Google Search works”.
Crawl. A program, the crawler (Googlebot), travels the web by following links. It discovers your page because another page, on your site or elsewhere, points to it. It downloads the page, its styles, its scripts, and renders it the way a browser would.
Index. Google analyses what it has downloaded and decides whether or not to file it in its index: a gigantic database of pages. A crawled page is not necessarily indexed. This is a point almost every beginner misses, and it explains half of all disappointments.
Rank. When someone types a query, Google searches its index, not the web, for the pages that answer it best, and puts them in order. Only here is the famous “position on Google” decided.
The order is a chain of dependencies. A page the crawler cannot reach will never be indexed. A page that is not indexed will never be ranked, however good its content. The whole discipline known as search engine optimisation, or SEO, consists of breaking none of these three links, in that order.
What “organic search” means, and does not mean
Organic results are the ones that appear because Google judges them relevant, as opposed to paid ads, which appear because someone paid. An organic position cannot be bought. Google says so bluntly in its starter guide: nobody can guarantee a first place, and anyone who promises one should raise suspicion.
What you can do, on the other hand, is very concrete: make sure the crawler reaches your pages, that nothing forbids it to index them, that each page says clearly what it is about, and that it does a real service to the person searching. The rest follows.
The delay is real, and you need to know it before you start
Google warns: between a change and its effect in the results, anywhere from a few hours to several months can go by. A brand-new site can take weeks just to be discovered. So you never judge a change the next day; you judge it after a few weeks, with measurements in hand. Those measurements come from Search Console, the first account to open, a free tool provided by Google itself.
What the rest of the series will cover
Each part deals with one link in the chain, in the order you should tackle them: why a page is not on Google and how to check; Search Console, the first account to open; the sitemap and what it really does; internal linking; writing your pages; the business profile for local companies; websites in several languages; and the questions-and-answers page, the FAQ. The final part will put everything back in order, like a checklist.
One single promise until then: everything stated will point to Google’s documentation, not to an opinion.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.