Google Algorithms Then And Now | Changes That Happened in Google Algorithms
What are Google Algorithms?
Algorithms are rules we use to determine a problem’s solution. There are lots of websites now on the internet. When we search a query on the internet, we see a website’s list, and when we go down to the page bottom, we see pagination. It shows us 1,2,3,4,5,6 and more pages with websites for our query. For example, when we search for a topic, it shows us ten websites on page one. And it has nine more pages where we show ten websites as well, so there would be a total of a hundred websites that Google is ranking on these ten pages.
There would be websites in those 100 websites that would be better than the other ones. And there will be one website that is the best among all. If you use the Google search engine, do you think Google has hired a person who goes through a hundred websites with the same topic, reads through them, and then indexes them accordingly? And so do they need to do for several keywords, and some topics might have a hundred plus content available on the internet. If that were the actual case, Google would need to form a country and name it Google. They need to hire a million people to carry out these tasks and other internet-related works like SEO services that are very important for search engine rankings. If people start doing that manually, that is insanely ridiculous and impossible to carry out.
The Need for Google Algorithms
Since there are many websites, the need for algorithms was necessary. The world is becoming quite fast with the advent of technology. Experts made these algorithms that crawled through search engine page results and indexed them accordingly. It is pretty fast and feasible compared to the hypothetical situation we created earlier, where we would be doing all this work manually. When you type in a query on a search engine, it shows you immediate results.
Imagine a person sitting at the Google headquarters, and when a person searches for a query, he works on it and presents several lists of search engine pages to him. Can he do that? Can even a group of people do that, as over a billion internet users worldwide? That’s why the algorithms were necessary to carry out these tasks more readily for us. It is just like a factory where machines do everything under human supervision. Experts make these algorithms and, from time to time, amend them to make them better.
How Did Google Algorithms work?
As we said above, search engines keep changing their algorithms from time to time. It is technical information to tell you how algorithms work. So, we will break down to you in simple language how they function, so you get its basic idea. Know that there is not only one factor Google considers in ranking websites. And there are multiple factors. According to experts, we divide the process into three key steps.
Crawling
The first step is crawling. Google has its bots, which it calls spiders. They crawl through web pages on the internet, see the content, and check if any page has made updates. However, it doesn’t crawl every website. The content creator needs to keep the SEO factors in mind to get a website crawl. It means if your website doesn’t have keywords in its content internal and external links provided, it won’t necessarily even crawl it. Search engines set these things to count websites into the competition, so if you don’t use them, you don’t get involved in competition with them, and therefore, search engine algorithms won’t crawl your website. If you have rightly used keywords, have high-quality backlinks, and have internal links, Google algorithms will crawl your website.
Indexing
After spiders do the crawling, the next step is indexing. When spiders go through your content and see multiple factors like meta tags, descriptions, keywords usage, internal and external links, and more, it indexes your page. Indexing a page means Google will assign the query keywords to different websites. When they do this, you can find websites after searching for a query. It shows you the most relevant results, and the website that performed the best for search engine optimization appears at the top of the search engine results page. Search engines store the information they collected through crawling and then store it in their databases.
So, now you have the basic knowledge about how search engines work. You didn’t become an expert by reading this, and however, you got minimal knowledge about search engines. Now, let’s discuss below what changes Google made in its algorithms and how these alterations are different.
Difference Between Algorithms Today and How They Were Yesterday
Know that one exactly knows what Google algorithms are when they change it and how they change it. However, the field experts give us ideas about all of it to make us understand. Here is a most common example of then vs. now Google algorithms: Search engines used keywords to determine where they should rank a website on search engines in the early days. When people learned about it, they started doing keyword stuffing in their posts. They used to unnecessarily include keywords in their content even where they weren’t needed. They knew that the more times they had keywords, the better their chances to rank websites.
Google changed its algorithm and set penalties for violating it to avoid this. If a website breaks the rules, Google can penalize its website. But these people introduced a new black hat technique not to make visible content but invisible content on web pages. They started using HTML and making the white text so it won’t become visible and get traffic. Google also detected it, and now the algorithms are much more intelligent. Therefore, the only way to get rank is to make a genuine effort.
