How does Google find and rank a page?

Google works in three stages. It crawls the web to find pages, indexes them by reading each page and storing what it is about, and serves results by picking the indexed pages that best answer each search. A page has to pass all three before anyone can find it. Google describes the stages in its own guide, how Google Search works.

1. Stage 1CrawlGoogle finds the page through a link or your sitemap.
3. Stage 2IndexGoogle reads it and decides whether to keep it.
5. Stage 3ServeGoogle shows it for the searches it answers best.

How does Google find a new page?

Google's bots (automated programs that fetch pages) find new addresses in three ways:

• Pages it has visited before. It rechecks known pages for changes.
• Links from pages it already knows. A link from your homepage to a new article is how Google usually finds that article.
• Sitemaps. A sitemap is a file that lists your pages. Submitting it in Search Console tells Google where to look.

For a new site with no other sites linking to it, the last two are all there is. That is why a sitemap and links between your own pages matter more at the start than they will later.

What happens when Google indexes a page?

Google reads the text, images and video on the page and stores what it learns in its index, a very large database (indexing). It also groups pages with the same or very similar content, and picks one of them to show, which a canonical tag lets you influence. If you have two pages saying the same thing, Google decides which one appears, and it may not be the one you wanted.

Indexing is not automatic. Google says it does not guarantee that it will crawl, index or show any page, even one that follows its guidelines. To see whether a page made it, use Search Console, covered in how to check if a page is on Google.

How does Google choose which pages to show?

When someone searches, Google looks through its index for the pages most relevant to what they typed, then orders them. Google does not publish the full list of what it weighs. What it has said, and what independent studies have measured, is collected in what does and doesn't affect Google rankings.

Google also says it does not accept payment to crawl a site more often or to rank it higher. Ads are sold separately and marked as ads.

What does this mean for a new site?

Each stage has a step you control:

1. Crawling: submit a sitemap, and link every new page from at least one page Google already knows.
2. Indexing: give each page its own subject, so Google has no reason to treat it as a copy of another.
3. Serving: answer one search per page, completely, and give the answer early.

The next module covers the free tool that shows you each stage for your own site: Google Search Console.