What You Should Know About Search Engines

The purpose of search engines (the major ones being Google, Yahoo, and MSN) is to provide high-quality information, quickly and easily, to those who are using them. Right now, Google is considered the top search engine, with almost 60% of all search traffic.

Spiders - How Search Engines View Your Site

Before search engine can provide you with results, they need to know what exists on the Internet. Some people may believe that in that 1 second between when you hit “Submit” and when they return results, the search engines go through the entire web to find the results to your query. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as “real-time” as that. The search engines actually have local versions of all the web pages they can find on the Internet and from their own history, they build up the results that they return to you.

The search engines have these programs called Spiders, which are constantly combing (or crawling) the web and adding new web pages and content when they find it. Some web sites might never get visited, some might be crawled several times a month, while other ones that are constantly changing (like CNN.com) might be visited multiple times each day.

The Lesson for Spiders

1. If search engines (or Spiders) don’t know that your web site exists, it won’t be crawled, and it will never be displayed as a search engine result.

Index - Where the Spiders Store Their Data

The Index is where the search engines store all the data that the Spiders find. The search engine looks through this Index and tries to bring back the most relevant results for the query that you made to the search engine. Since the Index is built from what the Spiders find, the Index can only return results that the Spiders have found. If you made a change to your website yesterday, the Index probably doesn’t have that change because the Spider hasn’t found it yet.

The Lesson for the Index

1. When you update your website, it may take several weeks for the changes to be recorded in the search engine results.

Search Engines are Just Computers

Search Engines are just computers and can only do what they are programmed to do. One thing that most computers cannot do very well is to look at images and interpret them. This means that if the text on your website is all in graphical images, the search engines probably can’t read it. A website might be aesthetically pleasing to you but if it’s all images, and no text that search engines can read, they do not know what the website is about. And when they don’t know what websites are about, they usually won’t have the website listed in the search engine results.

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